Guest post, continued: Karen Hollis on working with the dysgraphic child

This is the second post in Karen Hollis’s three-part series; be sure to read Part One as well.

How do you go about educating a child who is still having such tremendous problems forming each letter that writing anything even as long as a single sentence is an overwhelming, painful struggle? You do work on writing, which will be the focus of my entry next time.
But mostly, you read, talk, play, and make things.

1. Read, and talk about what you read. Books remain the centerpiece of dysgraphic education. But for many years your child’s response to texts can be primarily oral: talk, talk, talk about what you read. If your child wants to tell stories or likes drawing pictures to accompany narration, be the scribe; this will go on far longer than with a neurotypical child. But don’t rush to get out from under it. Your child is thinking with language, learning to think and to order her thoughts – that’s what you want to develop as extensively as possible.

2. Play. In subject areas, learn to think of hands-on activities and games not as “enrichment” or occasional ways of bringing some entertainment value to drill, but as crucial ways in which children learn.

Current brain research is showing us the extent to which learning relies on the physical body, to a degree that scientists and educators did not previously comprehend. With children this is even more the case; their tactile, sensory, and kinesthetic senses are all intricately involved in the processes of learning. Dysgraphic children, many of whom have trouble with fine motor coordination or have associated sensory processing disorders, need even more experience using their minds and bodies together. It takes them longer to build the neural connections.

And play together: not only math games but writing and grammar games as well. Most dysgraphic kids have come to think about writing as a dreaded task that locks them into a solitary battle against paper and pencil. One way to take away that isolation is to make writing into a social game. (See resources.)

3. Make things. This is not true of all dysgraphic kids, but many of them often have fine motor impairments in other areas as well as writing, or find that using a pencil hurts their hands.

As well as finding the physical act of writing painful, my daughter could not tie her shoes until she was nine or ten, still has trouble using a knife or pouring liquids from containers, and cannot manage a musical instrument. For kids with fine motor deficits, learning to write requires strengthening hand muscles, using and developing fine motor skills on a consistent basis. Any kind of making or building will engage your child as visual-spatial and motor skills are formed and strengthened.

Again, these kinds of activities will go on longer than is usual for most kids. Much, even most, of my daughter’s schoolwork was hands-on rather than paper-based right up through sixth and into seventh grade. It was not that mentally she wasn’t ready for the logic stage; in fact I think she was born with her pre-frontal lobes ready to go, and she could think abstractly at a very young age. But her hands and eyes weren’t ready.

It is extremely important not to have the attitude that dictation, hands-on activities and games are what you do just to fill in the time until your child is ready for “real” academics, or that they are only supplemental and that your child is missing the core. Rather, these kinds of activities are academic in their own right. I can’t emphasize this enough. They may look like “just” play; but for a dysgraphic child, they are building connections between hands, eyes, and brain, forming a base of tactile, spatial, and visual knowledge. They are forging basic neural networks necessary for extended writing. A dysgraphic child will often need to strengthen other modes of learning if the visual system is tangled up or compromised.

Why isn’t a focus on more writing practice the path to improving a dysgraphic’s poor writing? I’ve learned at least one reason from watching my daughter’s year of occupational therapy. At age nine, my daughter could not yet ride a bike. She had terrible trouble balancing in any physical activity, in fact. Instead of having her practice balancing on a bike, the OT would try her out with an activity that required balance: sitting on a particular kind of swing while batting a balloon with a tennis racket; standing on (and falling off) a rocker board while throwing beanbags at a target; balancing on stilts. She would be on and off a number of different pieces of equipment in a relatively brief period of time.

At first I was very confused. How was this helping her to balance? Shouldn’t she master one thing before moving on to another? But it is the very fact of having to figure and re-figure out how to balance that does the neural work. It’s similar to riding on horseback (an activity that has tremendously impacted my daughter’s handwriting, believe it or not). Constantly re-adjusting and re-balancing, the theory goes, helps the brain eventually figure out how to make general balance automatic. The brain no longer has to focus so much on that act, so more areas and energy are freed up to take in other input, other learning.

Same thing with writing. Constantly challenging a child to use her hands in more ways, working with different materials, switching from fine motor to large, whole body motions, all build brain-hand-eye connections in different ways, forming multiple neural connections, and eventually contribute to making automatic what had previously been such a deliberate and focused struggle. (See resources.)

Equally as important is the fact that playing cooperative games, building, reading and discussing without the pressure and pain of writing will also allow your child to feel confident about what he or she CAN do rather than constantly feeling discouraged, or even more dangerously, like a failure, unable to produce the amount or quality of written text that many curricula decree a student “should” be do at a particular age.

Resources for general fine motor development, eye-hand coordination, etc.:

Chicken Socks and Klutz activity books. The Chicken Socks series is aimed at the preschool and early elementary set, with booklets using bright colors of tape, pipe cleaners, beads and sequins, clothespins, markers, etc. Klutz books are for older children. What sets them apart from standard crafts kits (at least for us) is the quality of their instructions. With their directions my daughter was able to learn to do basic origami, make string figures, curl paper into ornaments (well, sort of), use a spirograph, weave a potholder, and make pipecleaner animals. She tried to learn to juggle.

Puppets. Learn how to make them talk; manipulate them in different ways. Put on puppet shows of favorite stories.

Marble runs.

Trains, cars, or anything that requires laying track.

Legos. My daughter found K’Nex disappointingly difficult, but other kids may be able to manage them better.

Puzzles, if your child enjoys them.

Doing dolls’ hair in braids, buns, and other elaborate styles. Use the little orthodontic rubber bands, which really work fingers.

Beginning sewing kits.

Play dough, and then later, stiffer clay.

Wikki Sticks and pipe cleaners.

Musical instruments, if your child has the dexterity and strength to learn to play.

Jacks (again, if your child can manage).

The game Touch. Kids must stick their hand into a covered bowl and distinguish by touch alone a small plastic article to match the drawing on a card.

Resources for academics

Find books that do messy art. Take this over picture study or drawing, although these are also wonderful if your child enjoys them. Messy art projects will incorporate more upper body motions, strengthening the arm from the shoulder, and helping with eye-hand coordination. Look into your local art museum, too. Through a local series free family classes my daughter has painted in chocolate using a Hershey’s squeeze bottle, made “installation art” using string and yarn draped all over a room, built with rocks, painted furniture by dripping and slinging paint, hammered junk together into a found art sculpture, and wrapped objects like Christo wrapped huge architectural structures.

Messy science. Again, don’t stop reading; but equally, don’t use books to the exclusion of activities that require your child to use fine motor skills. My daughter found pouring things very difficult, but she loved kitchen chemistry (in other words, making big messes with kitchen stuff) which involved pouring, measuring, stirring (and extensive spilling, for years). GEMS publishes a wonderful series of lesson units on such things as bubbles, slime-making, dry ice. These are not simply fun things to play around with. The units are developed by scientists, incorporating the collection and analysis of data, formulating both questions and theories, and eventually, isolating variables for controlled experiments. Take pictures and paste them in a lab notebook. Have your child dictate labels or explanations.

History and geography projects. There are any number of activity books out there, some of which are great fun and truly educational rather than simply craft. I’ve used Ancient Egyptians and Their Neighbors, plus any number of books from two series: the first, Great ________ [insert time period] Projects You Can Build Yourself; the second, a series containing titles such as Leonardo da Vinci for Kids, Marco Polo for Kids, World War II for Kids, etc. Cook your way around the globe; cooking is a window into culture and history, a fun and rewarding activity, and – if you put away the mixer and get out the wooden spoons and rolling pin – requires a lot of physical work.

Spatial math games and activities. Math is not just numbers and arithmetical computation. Yes, you do those things, but you can do them with manipulatives or even jumping around (see Peggy Kaye’s Games For Math). TOPS has a large kit called Lentil Science (set-up is a bit involved, but then your child will have months of activities ready to go) in which kids learn the concepts of addition, subtraction, proportion, division, and more with a whole pile of various sized containers between which they scoop and pour lentils. Marilyn Burns’s marvelous “replacement units” almost always use an activity or a hands-on way of approaching any given mathematical concept, moving from there into discussion, and finally, written mathematics. Math Explorer, put out by the same wonderful people who develop exhibits and books for the San Francisco Exploratorium, also uses games and objects to discuss strategy, logic, and sequence.

In case you are panicked by the thought of using such things not as enrichment but as the basis of a curriculum, I can tell you that my daughter went through to fourth grade barely setting pencil to paper for math, following just such a program of activities and oral math games as I have described; went on to incorporate writing only slowly; and transitioned in eighth grade to an algebra textbook with no difficulty. By this point she had overcome or compensated for most of issues underlying her dysgraphia. She’d also been exposed to a lot of beginning algebraic concepts through Marilyn Burns books and Hands-On Equations, she’d learned her math facts by rehearsing them through a variety of games and oral math, and gone through the whole of an elementary math program through informal activities and games. Graphs are a continuing struggle, as she still has problems holding a ruler still while drawing a straight line, and is not comfortable with the tiny keys that are standard on most graphing calculators. But I am pretty confident by now that alternative ways of approaching these kinds of issues are out there.

Through games and hands-on activities you can also develop your child’s spatial abilities, which are crucial for higher math. Play RushHour, River Crossing, Four in a Row, Gobblet; checkers and chess; card and dice games; three-dimensional mazes. Make tangrams or pentominoes and challenge one another. Learn how to fold origami. Again, these are NOT supplements to a regular math curriculum. They are a vital part of mathematical thinking and playing the games is just as academically valid as learning to add fractions.

I love all of Peggy Kaye’s books. Games For Math and Games For Writing take two skill areas that are often emotional and traumatic for dysgraphic children and turn them into sociable, engaging games. Especially if your child is discouraged over writing problems, don’t sit her down at the table and say, “Now we’re going to work on a math game.” Instead, invite her to play. I have no qualms at all about using a little psychology along the lines of having my daughter first help me with some boring chore or other and they say, “You know, we did this chore we didn’t particularly want to do and now it’s time for some fun. Let’s play a game to relax a bit.” Have a selection of a few selected games laid out and invite your child to choose. Or, I can always draw my daughter in by going to work on an individual game like FrogHoppers or solitaire and then saying, “Hm. I’m stuck. I have no idea what to try next. Oh, that? You’re right. Can you show me how you figured that out so I can do it by myself better next time?”

In the case of writing, send a coded message or a note written in invisible ink inviting a response. Or involve the family: see Peter Stillman’s Families Writing, do some of the suggested activities in If You’re Trying to Teach Kids to Write, You’ve Got to Have This Book with your child. Play MadLibs or hangman.

I’ve saved the ultimate resource for last: people on the special needs boards are a wealth of suggestions for great resources.