JEDDAH, 6 July 2003 — A weeklong workshop on children’s learning disabilities began yesterday. Participants include teachers and graduating college students at the Education College.
The workshop is given by Hana Shamma, an assessment and educational specialist from the Maharat Center for Cognitive and Skills Development.
Maharat Center is a non-profit center established in 1994 to identify children and young adults with learning disabilities and to design and implement individualized skills and development programs for them while also providing families and teachers with the necessary skills and support for facilitating the children’s development.
“Our goal in these workshops is to raise people’s awareness about learning disability (LD) and enable teachers to identify students who might have LD and work with them,” said Shamma.
Learning-disabled children are frequently labeled lazy because they are inherently poor readers and listeners, impulsive, easily distracted, hyperactive or unable to connect thoughts; these can cause them to suffer low self-esteem.
A child with LD does not have a physical disability or mental retardation; in fact, they are always of normal to high intelligence, “geniuses and gifted children are the ones most likely to suffer from learning disability,” said Shamma.
The workshop introduced the participants to various types of LD such as dyslexia (reading difficulty), attention deficit and hyperactive disorder (ADHD) and dyscalculia (math difficulty) and their characteristics. The workshop will cover teaching strategies appropriate to each of these disabilities.
