Helping You Understand What Your Child Is Going Through

Fourth grade is around the time when the curriculum starts becoming increasingly abstract, conceptual, and dependent on words rather than sensory stimuli. Classroom teaching becomes increasingly focused on "lecture" style classes that place a premium on receptive language skills and the increased class sizes diminish the ability for one on one teaching.

Simulation Exercises to Help You Understand Your Child

• Mirror Writing: Get a mirror and place it in front of you upright on the table. Look in the mirror as you write a sentence to your child thanking them for trying so hard in learning.
• Speeding Up The Process: Have someone read to you a paragraph out of a textbook at the leisurely pace of 30 words per minute. Then another paragraph at 45 words per minute. Then another paragraph at 60 words per minute. Then another paragraph at 90 words per minute. Then 120 words per minute. Now we're getting up to the levels of auctioneers, and the verbal "fine print" in radio & TV advertisements where the announcer speaks very quickly about the "void where prohibited" and other legalisms advertisers have to include to prevent lawsuits.
  At slower delivery rates you can understand and remember everything pretty well. As the pace picks up, notice how your anxiety level starts to rise as you try to grasp what is being said and remember and understand. Eventually it just becomes a joke. You don't even try any more, because it is obviously impossible. This may be something like what FASD kids experience beginning in the 4th grade: It is as if each year the teacher is speaking faster and faster.
  Of course, they don't actually do that, but each year they're using bigger words and longer sentences, and they don't slow down! Every year it gets worse! So the anxiety level increases and eventually they just stop trying and begin to act out.
  Children with lower auditory and visual processing abilities can become saturated very quickly in a school environment with many children and teachers speaking in normal instructional voices. Many FASD children process at a 3-5 digit span which complicates their ability to receive and understand information.
  

Sensory Integrative Dysfunction A pediatric neurologist explains this more fully:

Imagine you are sitting in a stiff back chair (uncomfortable) trying to read a book (concentrating) but there are huge speakers on each side of your head booming loud music (auditory overload) and a bucket of bleach sitting at your feet (smell overload) and you were simultaneously trying to watch your favorite TV program....you would literally be completely sensory overloaded...you would not be able to recall the words you were reading, the conversations etc. on the TV you were watching ...right? This would be extremely frustrating if you couldn't get away from the speakers, the bleach or the stiff chair no matter how hard you struggled. More or less a low sensory threshold issue is the same for these kids, and ADHD just complicates it because they literally pay attention to all of these things to the same high degree (attention deficit ... cannot ignore anything) and how would you react to such over stimulation with no route of escape...your body would do it even if you didn't....you would physically try to destroy the thing compromising your thought.