“I went from someone on the verge of dropping out of university, barely able to read more than a few paragraphs of text without difficulty, to someone who is now well read in classic literature (Verne, Dickens, Dumas). Academic text books are now fun and engaging.”
Autism
How It Works:
Meet the Team
Margo Fourman
Having personally overcome severe dyslexia and dyspraxia, Margo passionately helps students worldwide to leverage their unique abilities.
Founder, Co-Director
Dror Schneider
Dror has extensive experience teaching natural vision improvement and combining neurodevelopmental and sensory insights to support educational needs. She travels frequently from her home in Georgia, USA.
Co-owner and Co-Director
Abir Baidoun
Tariesa Gildenhuys
Chiara Meloni
When you have a child with autism and dyspraxia, it can be hard.
For you, for your child, for the teachers.
Teachers and even family members often fail to see the bright, hard working, kind child you know. They often fail to see the intelligence, the honesty and the eagerness to do well. All they see may be the social challenges and poor physical control. They get fixated on the difficulty to adapt and accommodate.
Sensory issues, social isolation and anxiety impact day to day life. You wonder if your child is bullied at school and yes, you often have a good reason to be concerned.
Traditional tutoring is often not enough
The traditional, well-intentioned advice for learning often relies on endless repetition. For dyspraxic learners it is harder to reach automaticity (when the task becomes easy and you don’t have to think about it). Repetition often produces results eventually but only in the exact skill practiced. Generalisation to other tasks is not automatic or inevitable.
Multisensory approaches are also popular. Dyspraxic autistic children are often hypersensitive (e.g., to sound, to touch, to visual input) which may mean they actually need to reduce sensory input to avoid overwhelm. In these cases including all the senses can actually make it worse, not better.
If the underlying issues are not addressed, dyspraxic learners, even adults, often need to read again and again in an effort to extract meaning. The effort going into the technical process of reading reduces the available brain power for understanding and remembering the content. One of the things we see with some of our autistic learners is that they may remember – but aren’t able to generalize and apply what they’ve learned.
It’s not your fault – you’ve been doing all you can to help them.
The effort you put in likely got some results, but you want to see them thrive.
Here’s the reality…
For best outcomes long-term support may be needed. Much can be addressed through a neurodevelopmental program that uses neuroplasticity to help with sensory processing irregularities, motor planning, muscle tone, anxiety and resilience.
Some differences may persist. But life can be better when a person understands their unique abilities and learns to maximize their impact. Better understanding can lead to more positive social interactions at work, at home, and in the community.
For those with Autism compounded by dyspraxia, there are specific secrets that often help to succeed in school… and in life.
Many of the things you may have been told are wrong:
Most people will tell you that their handwriting and typing will only improve with endless practice.
But that’s a hard and unproductive path for a dyspraxic student. There is a better, kinder way. To improve handwriting and keyboard skills it is better to address coordination and sensory processing through a neurodevelopmental program.
Most people will break work down into tiny chunks to teach it step by step. In our experience, many people with dyspraxia think intuitively. They need context to learn effectively. Their best answers just pop into their heads without knowing how. It may seem like a guess but it is intuitive thinking. What’s been missing is that they need to learn to reverse engineer the answers that pop into their heads so they can explain them to other people. Once they learn how to explain their answers they can often get the grades they deserve.
Autistic learners tend to be very literal, often collating large amounts of information interestingly but sometimes finding it challenging to see the bigger picture. The dyspraxia may fill in for that but not always. These two thinking styles often support each other, but it may need a specialist’s help to guide the learner to take advantage of this ability.