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To know the signs and symptoms of Apraxia you first must understand what it is. It is a condition that affects the ability for children to perform certain body functions. "It is a disorder of voluntary movement consisting of impairment of the performance of skilled or purposeful movements, notwithstanding the preservation of comprehension, muscular power, sensibility, and coordination in general; results from acquired cerebral disease."

This condition is most commonly diagnosed between the ages of birth and two years of age, and early warning signs would be a child's inability to perform simple tasks that are age appropriate, and easily performed by healthy children of the same age group. Apraxia can rear it's ugly head in many different forms. According to case studies, by Liepmann, there are three major types of Apraxia, each of which is caused by damage to different parts of the brain. These three types are ideational, ideo-motor, and kinetic-with subgroups.

An individual with Ideational Apraxia will have difficulty with producing complex serial actions involving objects. For example, if you ask a person with this type of apraxia to brush their teeth, the thought gets lost in translation. They may pick up their tooth brush, but they will forget what to do with it. They will probably brush everything but their teeth, and you will have to coach them along the way on what to do. This is because of disruptions at the conceptual stage of motor planning where the purpose and desire to perform specific movements are formulated.

The individual with ideo-motor Apraxia has disturbances in the planning stages and will have most of their problems with verbalization. They fail to translate the idea that they have into the action to perform the motion. So, the example here would be picking up the correct object, and trying to use it correctly, but just not quite getting it, such as- being asked to write their name with a pen. Picking up the pen, picking up the paper, but rubbing the pen on the paper not knowin what to do with it. They hesitate, they don't know what to do next.

Kinetic Apraxia has to do with movement. For a person with this type of Apraxia, tasks such as writing, typing, playing an instrument, or anything that requires sequential and smooth movements are next to impossible due to clumsy and mutilated movement patterns. The issue for this type of disorder is with sequential muscle behaviors, unlike the previous two conditions. Apraxia of speech is a subtype

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