A child who has been diagnosed as a slow learner will face a number of challenges throughout his life. As parents and educators, we need to take steps to make his academic and social life easier. Read on to know more.

A lot of parents often choose to think that when a child struggles to keep up with others, it is because he chooses not to. One of the hardest things for parents to accept is that their child could be a slow learner.

What is a slow learner?

A child is clinically assessed as a slow learner when he hits developmental milestones at a much slower rate compared to that of an average child, on a consistent basis. These developmental markers include speech, vocabulary and motor skills.

A child classified as a slow learner can also have challenges concentrating or recalling what they did without instruction or prompting later on. A child diagnosed as a slow learner can face extreme frustrations in his lifetime.

He may have social struggles, difficulties in staying motivated and may even go through bouts of anxiety and depression.

Parental support and understanding play a significant role in ensuring that these challenges do not result in social troubles in a child whose thinking skills have developed significantly slower than the norm for his age.

There are numerous ways to help a child who is struggling to keep up :

Use of Differentiated Learning

True to its name, differentiated learning allows for educators and parents to vary their teaching methods to meet the range of learner preferences. By adjusting their teaching styles, any facilitator can effectively reach out to both fast and slow learners.

For children classified as slow learners, special assignments, for instance, create opportunities for intensive sessions with the child.

Teachers need to handhold these students to attain higher educational success. For many high schoolstudents,online programs are also an option.

These programs offer the flexibility these students need to keep up with their peers.

Buffer the Distractions

Distractions are detrimental to children who have been diagnosed as slow learners. To begin with, they have poor concentration skills.

They are easily stimulated by background noises and other sensory information than the average kids.

So it is important that any kind of distractions be minimized.

A quiet and well-organized space is ideal instead of a decorated room.

Researchpublished in the Journal of the Association for Psychological Science, in fact, shows that heavily adorned classrooms end up disrupting attention and learning in many young students.

Keep Lessons Short

In the context of short attention spans, teachers and facilitators need to keep the times of learning compact as well. Smaller segments of learning will be more productive rather than one long session.

Repetitive assignments should be kept at a minimum.

For instance, let the child assessed as a slow learner do the even number problems only. Or use fill-in-the-blank questions instead of essay type questions.

Children diagnosed as slow learners are not only deficient in their basic skills and comprehension skills, but they can also be unsystematic and careless in their habits.

While there may be no single technique that is sufficient in teaching the slow learners, the suggestions above are good starting points to address their unique learning needs.