Dysgraphia blog post #2

[KarenAnne]

The second installment on dysgraphia is now up on SWB's education blog. This one is more specific and practical, where the first one was more philosophical.
www.welltrainedmind.com/blog

[Laurie4b]

Wonderful blog entry! Congratulations to you for persevering with confidence with a nontraditional approach to your child's education and then sharing your successful experience so the rest of us can learn from it!

[cathmom]

I thought it was interesting - my dd had/has severe dysgraphia, but had none of those other issues with fine motor skills or balance - she was taking horseback riding lessons at 3 (and doing quite well) and she's always been good at fixing things and manipulating things with her hands.

[KarenAnne]

How is she doing now? What kind of program or therapy did you follow, if any? What part of the writing process was the hardest struggle for her? I'd love to hear. Every child's dysgraphia seems to be different. There are so many components, from processing written information to spelling to forming letters to ordering ideas... each child seems to have a unique combination of the different elements. Some kids find a magic pencil grip and that's it, they're set to go... others struggle with every aspect right up into their teens.

Both my daughter and my husband are Aspies with writing problems. My husband has beautiful, almost calligraphic printing but is very labored and slow. He ran out of time on all his university-level essay exams, and now he always runs right up to deadlines (or past them) for writing related to work. He can work well within a few well-defined forms like grant funding proposals and academic articles, but has real trouble when he gets outside those narrow forms.

My daughter's writing can be fairly tidy but is most often spectacularly messy, with lots of misspellings (less than previously, though), and she presses so hard she breaks nearly every pencil she picks up. She writes with her head on the table or her nose on her paper despite all the efforts of her OT, an educational tutor (short-lived) and her mother. But she is also wildly creative, comfortable in many genres, writes all the time for pleasure and as a learning tool, has a strong sense of voice and style.

I'm always amazed at how differently dysgraphia has manifested in the two of them.

[cathmom]

My dd also has dyslexia. We had her tested when she was 12, and the tester also told us about the dysgraphia. Her writing was a mixture of capitals and lowercase, reversals, no spaces, little punctuation, etc. Writing anything except her name was a slow laborious process. One of the reasons we finally did the testing was that she was at the point of totally refusing to write anything!

We had tried to learn the 500 most common words in English for spelling and it took her forever to progress because she couldn't remember how to spell all the little 2 and 3 letter words. I think a big part of the dysgraphia for her was the issue of not even knowing where to start. She didn't know how to form the letters and even if she did, she didn't know which letters to write. She went over time on all of the subtests that required writing during her testing.

Since August 2008, she has been receiving O-G tutoring for the dyslexia on average of twice a week. Her tutor taught her cursive and she now has beautiful handwriting. It still takes her a long time to write anything, but she now asks how to spell 6 letter words, not 2 letter words.

[TammyB]

Thank you for sharing this. :)