Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional writing assessment

Thanks to all of the great information we have found on this forum, we have decided to have DD8.5 investigated for dyslexia/dysgraphia. Writing has ALWAYS been a huge issue for her. At the end of grade three, the gap between her writing work and her cognitive ability has become immense. I cleaned out her desk at school the other week (so she could move to her new school), and when I went through her work my heart sank. She has not had any 'real' homework this year... the odd math sheet or fill-in-the-blanks. I can't even begin to describe how bad her writing is, and the spelling is even worse. We have repeatedly asked her teacher this year if we should be concerned and she said it was improving. I like to think that I am not a pushy person, but my mommy-sense is tingling. She is a 'B' student and I have always had this feeling that something is missing with her ADHD/HG+ label. Not that I would ever wish another problem on her! But something has to be done to help her. My nephew has dysgraphia and I have seen how his diagnosis has helped him access extra help at school.

I called her psychologist this week to talk about it and she wants to bring her in for a writing assessment. Does anyone know what this would entail? I know she did quite poorly on the spelling part of the WIAT at 7yrs. She is booking into next year at this point, but is going to squeeze DD in after hours at the beginning of September so she can have the information for a school meeting right after school starts.

Also, any advice to help her with writing in the meantime? When I say that writing is the worst form of torture for this child, I am NOT joking. We encourage her to type as much as possible. Is this the way to go for now?

Thanks in advance. You have no idea how grateful I am to have found this forum. There is not a single soul I know that I can have this conversation with. Our family thinks that we are looking for things to be wrong with her and her school thinks that all is well because she is doing 'okay'.

I think that typing is a great long term strategy. To help your dd in the short term, you may need to take dictation.

DS now 13 had big problems with writing until he got to grade 5. We took dictation (trying hard not to put in the punctuation) if he was very tired. At other times, we had him dictate his homework on a small tape recorder. He played it back and then either hand-wrote or typed his work. This got around his working memory problems, but wouldn't help with weak muscle tone etc. These days, small digital recorders are fairly cheap.

He also used special software developed for people with dyslexia, including WordQ and Read and Write Gold. WordQ has a word prediction interface. The child types in a few letters and the software provides a list of words that start with the letters. The child picks the word from the list or adds letters to select it. This really speeds up typing.

DS used to play some Nintendo DS games that require typing such as Animal Crossing, and his typing skills improved considerably. This may work for your dd too.

I am an elementary school teacher as well as a mom. When I have a child who is having a lot of difficulty writing, I teach them (and their parents) to break the process into two parts. First the child says a sentence orally (for example, the answer to a worksheet question, or a sentence in a story she is composing) and the parent takes dictation. Next (and perhaps after a break) the parent dictates the students words back to her, and the student writes the sentence down. The parents can do this very slowly, repeating each word as necessary, sounding out words if necessary, and basically giving as much help as is needed for the child to write her own words. I find many students who are slow writers do well when they don't have to remember their sentences as they are writing.

At first this can take a long time, depending on how slowly or poorly the student writes. So maybe the student might at first just write one or two sentences in the sory and the parent could write the rest. As the child gets faster at writing, the child could write the first few sentences from dicatation, an dthen copy in her own handwriting what the parent wrote. the goal is to just keep scaffolding the assignment so the student gets practice in all three skills: 1) composing her own ideas into sentences 2) handwriting 3) writing from words in her own head.