CHILDREN

Many children struggle with Speech and Language, have difficulty paying attention and concentrating or have difficulties in school with reading or writing. Some children may be very active and unable to sit still. While others will have difficulties interacting with their school friends or siblings. In addition, many children have difficulties with balance and coordination activities or fine motor and planning and sequencing activities. These children may have been diagnosed with:

THE CLUAS PROGRAMMES FOR CHILDREN

The Cluas Programme has been developed over the past ten years by Pascal Maher, founder and Clinical Director of Cluas, and Ronan Maher, Programme Director of Cluas.

Cluas has been in operation since 2003 and 1000’s of children, teenagers and adults have successfully completed Cluas programmes. We provide Cluas @ Home programmes nationwide from our Dublin centre.

Information about the normal programme structure and length is available at Cluas @ Home programme. Also included here is information about how progress is monitored and reviewed with parents during and after the programme.

There is also more information at the Our Centre Based Approach programme.

Hearing and Listening

Hearing and listening are not the same! We hear sounds around us all the time but we do not always listen.

Listening is the ability to tune into selected sounds, process the sound and understand what the sounds mean. Listening is an active process compared to hearing which is a passive.

Many young people, with a range of developmental difficulties ranging from reading and difficulties to Speech and language difficulties to problems making friends and learning well in the classroom are poor listeners. Their poor listening is due to Auditory Processing Difficulties.

Auditory Processing Difficulties describe a set of difficulties in the way that individuals process sound – that is “what they do with what they hear”.

At Cluas we work with children’s auditory processing difficulties in order to improve their Speech and Language, reading and comprehension abilities, attention and concentration, and social difficulties to name but a few.

What is The Cluas Programme?

At the core of the Cluas programme is a unique system of sound stimulation – our programme uses sound – music – in order to retrain and improve a young person’s auditory processing skills. We use specialised sound equipment, to retrain the way the children gather and process information.

In brief our programme “tunes” (like tuning a radio) child’s ears and develops their auditory processing, so that they receive, process and understand all types of information in a significantly more efficient way. This process of retraining the way in which children process information facilitates, encourages and accelerates children’s development in a wide range of areas, including speech and language, the written word, social information and also the ability to filter out un-needed information (thus being able to pay good attention in class or at home).

Individualised Programme for each child

At Cluas we provide an individualised sound stimulation programmes for each child using our specialised sound equipment and we use specially recorded and modified classical music.

Depending on each individual child’s needs specific music will be played through our sound equipment, which processes and alters various acoustic parameters of the music. The music is delivered to each child using a unique pair of headphones. The specialised headphones deliver the music in two different ways: Air Conduction and by Bone Conduction.

We use specific music which is processed in order to stimulate the development of speech and language, communication, vestibular and cochlear systems and general neural development. The music is an essential part of the programme, but of greatest importance is how we process this music – through a complex system of  “gates”, “filters” and “channels” – to promote the child’s development.

The Cluas programme is extensive, with each programme devised to suit the unique needs of each child; the programme is also regularly reviewed and re-attuned to the child’s changing needs, as their program progresses.

More information about the programme structure and length is available at Cluas @ Home programme. This also includes information about how progress is monitored and reviewed with parents during and after the programme.

Younger children may choose for our centre based approach, however most children do the programme at home, in an environment they are comfortable with.

Also, information on how parents can arrange an assessment for their child and how to arrange a Cluas programme is provided at How can we help?

 

Cluas @ Home Our Centre Based Approach