Child counselling provides children with a secure environment where they can explore their difficulties through child-friendly and holistic approaches. Child counselling often involves 'play therapy' in addition to the commonly used talk therapy.

Through child counselling, we focus on enabling self-expression and we help children fully express their needs, worries and anxieties.

Identifying roots of behaviour
We aim to identify the roots of the problem behaviours – recognising why the child is emotionally hurt and what his underlying needs are, is a core step of child counselling and helps a great deal in remedying behavioural difficulties.

Modifying the child's behaviour
In this phase of therapy, we help children satisfy their needs in productive ways. Enhancing self-esteem is almost always a core aim here, along with instilling feelings of emotional security. We have periodic sessions with parents where we help them gain more perspective about their child, and understand the role they play in determining their child's behaviour.

Remedial therapy helps the child to:

• Recognise and apply phonics appropriately
• Recognise or work out words
• Be able to read efficiently so that reading is fluent, enjoyable and relaxing
• Be able to read well enough to take in the content of their reading
• Apply various skills to spelling
• Understand the concepts behind maths

This assists the child to:

• Understand the written or spoken message using various strategies
• To participate in conversation by planning and selecting language and ideas to get what he wants to say across to the listener
• Facilitating note-taking and study skills
• "Reading" non-verbal or body-language to assist in understanding the message

OT will assist children with learning disabilities to stimulate sensory motor function and to develop visual perceptual skills that are the building blocks for school related tasks such as reading, writing and mathematics.

We have a therapist who comes in by appointment.

Physiotherapy assists with:

• Balance problems
• Postural problems
• Co-ordination problems for both gross and fine motor skills

We have a specialized Maths teacher to assist boys with any backlogs or difficulties they may perceive in the subject from conceptual difficulties to application.

Our specialized teacher, who is also remedially qualified, assists boys with Afrikaans, whether they have difficulties with the subject or whether they are coping with the language for the first time. She is also able to assist with English curriculum work.

At the LAD Centre, we hold 2 support Group meetings a term. Sometimes we invite a guest speaker to talk on a subject of general interest to parents who may have a lad with LD. These subjects may vary from medications and alternatives to early intervention, to psychological issues, nutrition etc.

Other meetings are “Open Discussions” where parents may raise questions and voice their concerns round the subject of learning difficulties and related issues.