Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Left, right, or mixed dominance?

Forgive some of my basic questions, but here goes. I was just told my son (5) has mixed dominance, and a light went on for me. We started to be concerned a little over a year ago and had him evaluated by a PT, and an OT. We knew he hadn"t chosen a hand yet, but we were moist concerned about some of the frustration he was experiencing with letter recall. It has taken almost a year, but an OT finally told me she thinks he is a classic case of Mixed Dominance.

It makes all the sense to me. I've been scrolling the internet, and I 'm reading a lot of things that match my son. He has never been very cordinated. He is big for his size, so we assumed his nervous system just couldn't keep up. Another alarm went off when at age 5, he still couldn"t write his name. He kept switching hands and didn't develop much finger strength.

After a school year with weekly OT, we seemed to have settled on writing with our right, but we still use our left alot.

I guess my question is how can I learn more. This little guy is so gifted when it comes to spacial relationships. He can do advanced puzzles, play checkers, and several other spacial strategy games. Recall of letters is hard. How can I help him? I want to learn more, but don't know where to start.

Thanks!

I would recommend Handwriting Without Tears. http://www.hwtears.com/

Maybe you can use his spatial abilities to help him learn letters. Maybe modelling letters out of clay or using magnetic letters--something he can touch--would help.

The first thing I would recommend is to have a vision problem ruled out. My dd had trouble with letter identification. Turns out that she has a near-sighted/far-sighted astigmatism so she could not focus simultaneously on vertical and horizontal lines. Thus making it almsot impossible for her to indentify letters that contained both vertical and horizontal line. She learned her letters and began to read almost immediately after receiving her glasses.

There are some tricks I used with my younger son who had difficulty with letter recal. Use elmer's glue and trace over letters on a 3 x 5 index card leaving a thick bead to dry. Have your child trace the letters with his fingers as you introduce 3=5 cards at a time. Another method is to write letters in a box of sand.

Does he know the sound of the letter before he recognizes the symbol? He may be an auditory learner.

I started out RH, then at 6 started doing things LH out of boredom and for variety. This was tolerated by the school until 3rd grade where a teacher berated me for writing left handed and I stopped. In College I started doing LH stuff again as all my GF were LH but I am nowhere as good as I was when I was younger.

I think kids can learn to do both LH and RH equally well - and there are advantages to ambidexterity for input devices, writing, art, and sports. They just need encouragement.

"GS8 writes left handed but does most large muscle activities right handed."
This is me. (and I draw pretty well, too)
The lack of coordination can come from living in a right handed world when you want to grab doorknobs, put on baseball gloves, use those stupid knobby things they put on pencils all with your other hand.

What you mention about the tendency for large motor right handedness may come from a sort of reversed brain/eye dominance. (Reversed from what is 'normal' but not in a bad way)
I have read about this, but can't find where...for me it means my right brain is dominant, at least a bit, so I'm left handed. But also, my right eye is dominant - there is a simple test you can try for this. So in more full-body oriented tasks my eye dominance tends to take over.
Most folks are going to be left-brained, right-eyed, right-handed. Right brained, left-handed, left-eyed.
Has anyone else read about this?
Not sure if or how it would affect drawing ability except that I have heard that left-handers tend to go for art...

Do you mean some letters are written backwards or that he is switching out a couple or more letters in a single word? I think the first scenario is not dyslexia related and not a big deal at that age. The other scenario, I am not sure.

Here is something about the eye dominance, including the test:
http://ifmomsaysok.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/right-or-left-eyes-brains-oh-my/

Last but not least...my Grandad was ambi, batted left& wrote right. I can draw with both hands, although I usually rely on old lefty. DS8, looks pretty righty all the way, dd2, shows a little ambi tendency but it's way to early to tell. DH is Lefty all the way! I can assure you that all of this is entirely normal, and yet...

GS8(will be GS9 in 5 days!) reverses whole letters like 'b' & 'd'. I told him a trick to use is think of the word 'bed', make the 'OK' sign with both hands, hold them to together, and it looks like 'bd', or 'bed'. Other reversed letters are a bit harder, like 'p' & 'q'. I've told him they face each other when saying the alphabet, but he forgets to check. Other letters like 's', or numbers '2' & '5' are troublesome. While reading, or doing math, he seldom makes errors. He makes most of the errors when writing.

Another thing that causes him problems writing is actually forming the printed letter. When printing, we are taught to begin at the top and go down, or begin at the left and go right. He ends with mostly the correct form, but he creates it in reverse order, starting at the bottom or right and going in reverse. I've come to the conclusion that he learned to write on his own, he was never taught the typical way of forming letters. For several reasons, we had temporary custody off and on from the time he was 19 months for periods of 5-6 months at a time, until we got permanent custody when he was 5 1/2. He was drawing and coloring quite well at 19 months, he was making some letters. Somewhere along the line, he knew his letters & numbers, and already had a set pattern of making them. I think most of what he knew at 19 months was due to watching 'Blues Clues' videos non-stop.

When school starts again I think we'll get him back into swimming lessons and piano again.

It sounds very much like he prefers a visual-spatial (right-brained) learning style, with possible auditory-sequential, left-brain weaknesses. See http://www.visualspatial.org/ , especially http://www.visualspatial.org/Articles/appendc.pdf , http://www.visualspatial.org/Product_Marketing/RTTK/kidquiz.pdf , and the articles tab, especially http://www.visualspatial.org/Articles/wholes.pdf and http://www.visualspatial.org/Articles/teaching.pdf . There is also a fabulous book that is out of print and hard to get, "Upside Down Brilliance" by Linda Silverman.

Also, with fine motor and "coordination" issues, I would suspect sensory processing disorder (more basic issues with the central nervous system) - perhaps you can ask his OT about this, though not all OTs are well versed in SPD (not something the school system usually treats).

just my two cents

I agree with snowgirl that many of your concerns seem to reflect learning style issues rather than dominance issues. I have a left-handed, extremely linear and verbal kid, who at 7.5 is still confused about which hand to use for various activities and has great control with either. He's never been clumsy, is quite athletic, and we're worried because it seems like he'll never get really good at the sports he likes without choosing a side. After a day of tennis camp, the coaches said he had to go left-handed. Two days later, the coaches said he couldn't serve left-handed and he should play right. Poor kid doesn't know what to do and switches all the time without even realizing it. He plays golf left-handed, basketball right handed, and he throws with his right hand. He's great at math, has some musical talent, and he draws like a two-year old -- it's painful to watch!! He taught himself to write by about three and he writes quite well and he's never reversed letters and spelled at adult level by 5 or so.

He's not a visual-spatial kid and doesn't love puzzles, doesn't "see" like some kids and has been tested with lots of verbal strengths but less well on spatial things. He's my least v-s kid and the other two with more spatial strengths have had strong right-hand preferences from toddler age. I share this just for information because not choosing a hand doesn't necessarily indicate spatial strengths and verbal/text weaknesses.

I think dominance is quite a confusing topic. For many things (i.e. epilepsy surgery, recovery from brain injury, etc.) it matters most whether language is centered in the right or left hemisphere, but that doesn't depend on handedness much. For RH people, language is left brain about 99% of the time (numbers vary according to what you read). For LH people, language is *still* in the left brain for about 75-95% of people (again depending on which study you are reading). That makes me feel like the "dominance" language isn't especially useful and I like learning style description better. Your son sounds like a v-s type learner who may need extra help with text. My most v-s type kid did reverse letters and learned to read much more slowly than my more linear type kids.

My son did the same thing and he learned to write in Kindergarten because I was afraid that he would learn the wrong way if I tried to teach him. I only taught him to write his name.

He never made errors in reading the letters and when he accidentally wrote a letter backwards, he could see that it was wrong immediately because a b where a d was supposed to be would cause the word to be wrong. But if he accidentally wrote a 5 backwards and didn't catch it right away, especially when he did long division or something with a lot of numbers where he also had to worry about keeping columns straight, it would sometimes cause him to make a mathematical error. This was something he had to learn to check. He had to make sure his 2 was really a 2 and not a 5 that he accidentally wrote backwards.

He did Handwriting Without Tears but I would catch him going back to his old way of forming letters when he thought I wasn't looking. I notice that he even makes checkmarks backwards from the way I do it. It just seems totally wrong to me the way he does it but it looks okay, so I let it go.

I think my son's problem was more of a motor learning thing. I think he needed more writing practice on certain letters and numbers than most kids, just like he needed more practice to learn difficult dance routines. His auditory memory and visual memory (especially for words) is great but his mild motor learning problem is something he has to deal with.