Before Richard went onto the DORE Programme he struggled with most areas of school work. He could not retain what he was taught, his mind would continuously wonder off, he would hear an instruction but the follow through was delayed and often lost with the next detail. In speech, the grammatical order would be reversed. He hated writing, switched letters and had no concept of place on a page. In reading, he frequently lost his place and guessed words and sentences.
At school he seldom was on the same wave length as the teacher or anybody else and this led to much conflict with other children who tried to boss him. As a strong willed child he reacted by fighting and began to become aggressive and self conscious thinking he had to be stupid to struggle like that.
Richard was at a Remedial school, having all sorts of therapies but no improvement. He took forever to do work whether at school or at home. After two exasperating years with teachers, psychologists and therapists in, we took him out of the system and home schooled him to give him the basics he still didn’t have. Then he started with DORE.
He began to focus longer and reading improved immediately. Speech improved drastically with sentences coming out in correct order. Writing, though not neat at first, became less of a task and he soon began having a sense of where things were on a page.
Overall, he is able to focus in a mainstream classroom now. His concentration and work capacity has improved tremendously. He is far more aware of himself & his surroundings, more tolerant and interacts well with classmates not taking “bully bait”.
He is chuffed with his balance and that he can play ball sports much better. He is also very pleased with himself for the vast improvement in ability to do his schoolwork. He reads very well now and loves story books. Richard has become very interested in scientific matters and from not remembering simple sums he’s now doing very well in math’s.
The fact that we don’t have to motivate him every 5 minutes for the simplest of tasks and repeat every instruction 3 or 4 times before he acknowledges it, is a great stress reliever. He is developing a sense of self-responsibility and does have the ability to get down to doing his homework without having to be told and supervised through each step.
Through DORE Richard learned how the brain works and is now quite conscious of how to be healthy in body and mind. Through the exercises he learned physical balance but became aware of how he must be balanced in all things in life, for his overall wellbeing and long-term success. He has a greater sense of reality and a far more positive outlook of things. Has started to take his school work seriously because he understands he must build now for the big plans he has for his future.
Recently Richard learned what Ritalin is for, what some of the side effects are, and he was quite perplexed as to why any parent would put their child on Ritalin instead of on DORE. When he’d understood the different perspectives of how to deal with learning difficulties his words to us were:
“Thank you so much mommy and daddy for not giving up on me, even when I resisted you so hard. You were kind not to give me pills. DORE is much better. Thank you and I love you”.