Working memory problems?

[daylightdreaming]

Hi I'm not sure what to do and wondered if anyone has experience of dc with working memory problems.

Our DS was slow to get going with reading but is now pretty good after lots of intensive and consistent reading with him at home and school. ORT level 12 Y2 July born boy. However we initially thought he may have dyslexia as it runs in our family - my brother severely and I was slow to read initially and still have problems with left and right. I did get English 'A' level though :)

Anyway I'm wittering. The problem is in other areas - I think we'd been so focused on reading that we didn't notice everything else before. His handwriting is horrendous; he was in the middle group for spellings but was really struggling and was very miserable about it (the only child never to get 10/10 certificate) so is now in the bottom group which he's fine with as they basically learn one phonic set of words a week (e.g. all 'ar' words)so in reality he's sounding out and learning two letters(plus he gets a certficate ); the particular problem we've noticed is with his two times tables and as he recites them he gets completely muddled and can't remember were he is e.g he will say 1x2=2, 2x2=4, 3x2=6, 6x2=8, 8x2=10. He knows that he's counting up in twos and is trying so hard to remember that that he can't remember where he's up to.

I think it's some kind of 'processing' problem but don't really know what to do about it Has anybody had a similar problem? Is this just normal for his age? Any suggestions on what to do?
Thx

Yep, my DD has huge memory and processing problems.

The only thing that helped was Auditory Integration Training

I know that's probably not the kind of thing you were expecting to hear, but DDs problems were huge, and this really, really is the only thing that helped.....

Thanks Indigo Bell

I'm not sure if our DS has the same probs - I think his speech and hearing are the pretty good but I guess you always assume everything is okay before looking at anything else.

I thought there might be some more responses. Maybe it sounds like it isn't that big a deal as he's reading so well but it seems big to us. He gets in a complete panic when he's trying to work through his tables and the same for learning the harder spellings - almost hyperventilating or crying and he's complained that it all just seems to whizz around in his head.

Anybody have any thoughts?

daylightdreaming

Working memory is like the RAM of a computer, we use it to run the programs we use to perform all our daily tasks. and also like the RAM of a computer it has limited capacity. We priorities how we use our working memory subconsciously.

You might like to have a look at some research papers in the CiteULike Group: Human Memory Systems - library 123 articles many of which discuss aspects of working memory.