Page 59 - SEN114 September/October 2021

Dyspraxia
About the author
Cathy Parvin is Director of Dyspraxia Education a charity supporting children with dyspraxia/ DCD. She is a visiting university lecturer for SENDCo Award, P.E, PGCE, BA honours and Early Years courses. Her daughter has given her meaningful insight into the challenges and benefits of living with dyspraxia and neurodiverse conditions.
“A brilliant presentation about how her dyspraxia affected her”
be ready to deal with it if it happened. Miriam’s mum had also discussed with her the possibility of a negative outcome but Miriam was still really keen to do it. She assured me that Miriam would report any adverse responses.
The Dyspraxia Peer Awareness Assembly
The morning of the assembly arrived and despite having delivered hundreds of training sessions and keynote speeches on dyspraxia, I have never felt so apprehensive. I was deeply concerned about making things worse for Miriam but decided to trust her SENDCo’s judgement.
We began the assembly by exploring the ways in which we are all different, asking the children to raise their hands if they have brown eyes or blue? If they are tall or short? If they wear glasses or not? We asked if they thought that difference was good and they all agreed it was. We explained how we all find some things challenging and asked them to think about what they struggled with. Then we talked about how some children use wheelchairs, some hearing aids, others use white sticks and the importance of us helping one another. Moving on to how some children have difficulties which are not obvious when you look at them but still really affect them and, we explained dyspraxia is one of them. I asked if any of them had heard of dyspraxia and a couple raised their hands saying a brother or cousin had it. I explained about dyspraxia and how it makes some things difficult. Keeping it simple I told them about how coordination is affected, especially with being able to use both sides of the body together such as using a knife and fork, poor balance and then how fine motor skills are affected making fiddly things challenging.
Miriam then did her power point presentation. I noticed her little hands shake slightly as she tried to get her memory stick into the computer and my heart was in my mouth.
My fear was unfounded because she did a brilliant presentation about how her dyspraxia affected her. She explained what helped her and how horse riding improved her balance. As I looked around, the children and her teachers were totally absorbed. I wished I could have recorded it. Needless to say she got a well-deserved round of applause and her mum looked so immensely proud!
Then we did some exercises with the children explaining that to really understand dyspraxia it was important to experience how it feels for Miriam. We asked them to put gloves on and then gave them some tasks to do using only their non-dominant
hand. They had to try and undo sweet wrappers, open lunch boxes and write their name. This was to simulate poor fine motor skills. Next they had to stand on one leg (poor balance), close an eye (poor spatial awareness)and throw and catch a ball with one hand ( poor bilateral integration). The children completely engaged with it.
Having done these exercises with hundreds of teachers during Inset training sessions and witnessed the sudden appreciation by the teachers of the challenges these children face daily, I wondered would 10 year olds also be able to relate these exercises to Miriam and empathise with her? Would they appreciate that Miriam isn’t dealing with one area of difficulty individually but has to deal with them combined in every aspect of life, that the true impact is greater than the sum of the parts for her?
At the end the SENDCo brought them all together again and asked the children for their feedback and thoughts. One little girl raised her hand
“I feel bad I haven’t always been very nice but now I understand how difficult it is for Miriam. I will help her from now on” and many others nodded in agreement.
I can’t begin to describe the sense of relief but of course the question in my head was, would this understanding and positive response last?
After a few days I had a lovely email from her mum quoting Miriam: “When I knew I was going to do the assembly I was really happy because I knew if people understood about dyspraxia I knew I’d probably be treated better. Everybody could understand my needs during that assembly and I felt really relieved that finally people would understand what I
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