As I've indicated before, our boy Joel is an interesting kid. In many, many areas of life he is competent and very clever. In others, the opposite. Because he is clever, he has developed ways of coping with and hiding his struggles - often so successfully that we forget that they exist at all.
One thing Joel struggles with are labels. Putting names to things. We first noticed this when he was little. He didn't know his colours. He could sort things into groups, but for the life of him could not label the groups as blue, red or green. He didn't finally sort out pink and white until he was well over five. Learning the alphabet was a nightmare - so many letter names to remember! Numbers were no fun either, although he has a very good mathematical understanding.
Last night it was brought home to us that Joel, now in year 3, still does not know the days of the week. We asked him which of his teachers he had each day. He held up his fingers to represent the 5 weekdays and showed us that on days 1,2 and 5 he had Mrs. K, and on days 3 and 4, Mrs. V. He could not explain it in any other way. Months remain a complete mystery.
Joel has many other funny little habits. If we ask him to spell a word he will often spell it using his fingers, moving them into the shape of the letters. It's as if he's playing a game, spelling it without opening his mouth. What I think he's really doing is covering for the fact that he can't remember the letter names.
There are many other things that we have put down to quirks in his character which are probably little strategies he has developed to help him through life.
I can see that Joel has huge potential to create, explore, imagine and love. But I don't understand how his mind works. I'm thankful that God does.
The problem you are talking about is called a word-finding difficulty. It's pretty rare in kids. Common in adult stroke victims. But, that's Joel. He's an individual.
ReplyDeleteIt only seems to be nouns that he struggles with. Is that normal?
ReplyDeleteI have only seen for nouns, theoretically it can take place with anything. Is it only in confrontation, ie if he is shown a colour and asked its name, or can he name it in conversation? Often kids avoid it and use strategies to get around it.
ReplyDeleteAsk him to name as many animals as he can in 60 seconds and see what the result is.
He got 13 animals in 60 seconds. These did not include cat and dog, but did include loch ness monster, street rat, bandi-goat (bandicoot?), leopard, lion and imperial walker (!).
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't seem like very many to me.