Anybody familiar with dysgraphia?

[liketheriverrun]

At the parent teacher conferences last night, my son's third grade teacher suggested he may have dysgraphia, which is a learning disorder dealing with fine motor skills and manifests itself in the form of really sloppy handwriting.  Connor is the gifted and talented program but still struggles with a lot of his assignments, especially finishing

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dysgraphia

[mousedm]

Hey River

I've been so into SPN recently, I haven't visited here for a while and I was astonished to see this. This sounds so like my son who is 11. (He also loves, and is very good, with lego).

Daniel is homeschooled so we were able to tailor our studies around his needs. I just cut him a lot of slack on his writing. It was the one area he fought me in so I didn't push it. He's just been identified as having 'visual/motor integration problems' that is - fine motor control problems. We had him identified because he was accepted into the local community college for math classes. He's in precalculus and I can't teach him any more! There he has someone taking notes for him and he has extra time for tests.

The irony is, he passed the college's writing test because it didn't involve any writing! He can edit the wazoo out of other people's writing, but when it comes to his own, it lacks all sorts of punctuation and grammar.

By best advice would be to homeschool, but I know that isn't an option for many people. Actually as he grows older, he'll find that writing becomes less and less important. I know another kid with dysgraphia and takes his lap top everywhere and has an accomodation that he can take notes and even tests on his computer. People keep assuring us that voice recognition software will make even keyboarding outdated by the time our kids grow up. It's only schools that place such an emphasis on handwriting.

I guess my suggestion for now is to concentrate on his strengths. Let him shine in the areas where he's gifted. The OT gave us some special paper with alternatively coloured lines that is supposed to help his writing, but strongly suggests we concentrate on typing. There are some great programs out there like word prediction software that can help.

Please feel free to email me if anything here interests you.
jsdssam@embarqmail.com

Take care

Sarah

Re: dysgraphia

[liketheriverrun]

His teacher has really been great and we just set up a 504 program for him at school that will let him work more at his own pace. I realize that writing by hand is nearly obsolete in modern society, but there are other things that I worry about. Sure he can wear slip on or velcro shoes, but he really needs to be able to eat with a fork without looking like a land mine was hiding in his Mac and Cheese. *G* So I'm looking for possible exercises he can do to strengthen his fine motor skills.

He was typing this weekend for his science fair project and seemed to do well with that. I plan to pick him up a typing training program so he can improve on that and learn the home position, etc. Oh, and his teacher had him write on special paper with raised lines and it made a *huge* difference (I accused him of bringing home someone else's writing assignment because it was so neat. *G*) You might want to check that out for your son.

The problem with typing is that our state requires writing tests at various points in their schooling. The first will be in 5th grade and typing isn't allowed because of the issue with spell check, grammar check, etc. He will be allowed to have more time if he needs it on the 504 program, so that's good. I'm just hoping that we'll alleviate some of the anxiety he has with writing and that will be half the battle.

Thanks so much for the info and I'll keep your email handy in case something somes up!