Learning Disorders (LD)

When I started at Kennedy Krieger Middle School, I was very frustrated and angry because I did not think I needed to be here. Slowly, though, I began to see that Kennedy Krieger was the right school for me. But it took time. Today I realize that I needed to be here to get the education I needed, because I might not have done as well anywhere else.

September 14, 2011 (Baltimore, MD) -- A new study published today in the journal PLoS ONE reports that the precision with which preschoolers estimate quantities, prior to any formal education in mathematics, predicts their mathematics ability in elementary school, according to research from the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

"Come here, I want to show you something," Khai Walker calls upstairs to his father. His fingers flash across a video game controller as he maneuvers a pixilated basketball player down the court. His father, Kenith, sticks his head into the room and Khai, with a few precise key strokes, guides the player through an aerial spin and perfect slam dunk.

"Nobody can beat him at his games," says his mom, Jacqueline.

Learning to read can be a long and difficult process. The promise of first reading single words, then sentences, and then entire books waits like a light at the end of the tunnel. For a child with poor reading comprehension, however, the light never comes. Sentences are meaningless as the young reader struggles to understand the connection between different words.

Ask a young child what the toughest subject is in school, and he is likely to say math or reading. While there have been thousands of studies on reading disabilities and, consequently, methods developed for overcoming them there have been far fewer on math dysfunction. Michèle M. M.

Across the country, young adults preparing to enter the workforce are feeling the sting of a tight job market. Competition for employment is stiff for the brightest, most talented youth, much less young adults with learning, emotional and neurological problems.

As soon as Joshua Fine reached pre-school, his mother Kathleen noticed that he learned differently from his older brother. As he picked up his ABCs and began trying to piece words together, Josh often reversed the order of his letters. This tendency continued as Josh began elementary school, but never reached a crisis point. Although Josh frequently refused to read, his grades stayed adequate. But Kathleen harbored nagging suspicions that her son wasn't reaching his full academic potential.

When today's Kennedy Krieger Institute first opened its doors in 1967, its leaders were expected to continue and improve the state-of-the-art treatment services already available to children with cerebral palsy at the Children's Rehabilitation Institute, the original facility that became Kennedy Krieger, and to extend those services to children with a variety of other neurodevelopment