From an interesting story about a Michigan father who decided to use chess as a means for addressing his son's speech disability (the original article is no longer available on the web):
As a young child, Ben was diagnosed with speech dyspraxia, which made it difficult for him to speak like his peers. Often his sentences would come out rushed and jumbled.
"They wanted to put him in special ed classes, but I knew that he was highly intelligent," Scott Ploehn said. "He was in speech therapy. It's just that he had to really plan out what he was going to say before he said it."
Ploehn and his wife, Kris, began looking into ways to help Ben deal with his dyspraxia - and that's when Ploehn thought of chess.
"I had played since I was in fourth grade and knew it took a lot of concentration and forethought," he said. "And Ben just took to chess right away. He just really had the mind for it."
Ploehn said chess helped Ben remarkably, and he quickly showed a talent for the game.
1 comment:
Thank you for posting this. Benjamin is now a fine young adult with no sign of any speech impediments. The skills he learned from chess are helping him still in his continuing education as well as in the workplace.
Scott
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