Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional What does dysgraphia look like?

The more I read on here I'm becoming convinced that DS7 who is in first grade (just completed) has dysgraphia. Scores on WISC seem to substantiate this as well. 114-Verbal, 137-PRI, 110-WMI, and 121 PSI. He is much further ahead in math than reading, although ahead of grade level on both. However his writing is atrocious. At first I thought it was simply a handwriting issue and the spelling errors were grade level/age appropriate. However I'm becoming more concerned now that first grade has come to a close. My son wrote

ONe Day the Nite was waLkinG throw the woods sodley ther was a soud a horbol soud the Nite Pekd threw a Bos...
... he saw A MAiL and a FeyMAiL DaGN. he thot they yer GoiNG to MAt so he keld the DAGons.

BTW, his letter g's are mirror image G's as well. Where do I go to get something like this diagnosed? What can I do to help him at home? I think it is supposed to read One day the knight was walking through the woods, sadly there was a sound, a horrible sound, the knight peeked through the bushes and he saw a male and a female dragon, he thought they were going to mate so he killed the dragons.

I think it should be "suddenly", not "sadly". I'd be concerned too. Can you request that he be tested through the school?

Hi Camille,

Honestly that looks pretty good to me! I'd be thrilled if my son (finishing 1st) wrote that much...do you know about how long it took for him to write this? Does he resist writing?

Mo

But momosam, isn't your son diagnosed with dysgraphia? In my school district in southern New Hampshire, those sorts of problems-- severe lack of knowledge of encoding rules; ignoring certain sounds completely during encoding; getting other sounds completely wrong (e.g. "Bos" for "bush" shows an attempt to use an O to make a short U sound, "sodley" for "suddenly" does the same, and discards an entire syllable, etc.); persistent mixing of upper-case and lower-case letters; backwards Gs, etc.-- in a rising first grader would probably trigger an assessment for learning disabilities very quickly.

If you are concerned, there is probably something to be concerned about. Keep after it until you are satisfied and comfortable that what you have a good explanation for what you see. Is it just writing or other there other unusual language behaviors? How does he do with pictures, reading? Is his vision OK? How is his hand/arm strength for other activities such as peeling fruit, dressing, etc? Think about anything else you see and try to get a full picture of what's going on. Whether or not there's a disability, it will be helpful to know.

http://www.readingrockets.org/looking_at_writing/

Listed above is a website with real writing samples and guidance on teaching writing.

That's a great site. There's a huge difference between the first and second grade samples. I now think they must be doing something right at my son's school.

I'd listen to master of none and momosam, not me. My expectations may be out of whack.

"What does dysgraphia look like?"

Dysgraphia can look different in different children, and there are also different types of dysgraphia... so the answer to that question is "it depends".

My ds12 is dysgraphic, so I can compare/contrast your example with his writing, but keep in mind, he's only one example. My ds' handwriting at 6-7 years old was similar re mixing of caps and lower case and direction, but that's the main similarity. There are some huge differences - for instance, my ds would never have been able to write a sentence like that in first grade, or even in 4th grade using handwriting. Both the length and the detail are more typical of a child who can hold some thoughts in working memory - and for many kids with dysgraphia, the act of handwriting overwhelms their working memory, limiting their written output as much as fine motor or visual difficulties impact output. The other thing I noticed about your sample is that your ds used punctuation (periods at the end of sentences) appropriately; punctuation is often a struggle for kids with dysgraphia or at least comes later in the learning process. Your ds spelled the "Mail" consistently between male and female, even though he spelled it incorrectly - young dysgraphics who are struggling with spelling often spell inconsistently even within the same sentence.

The other things I can tell you about my son's experience with dysgraphia are:

When he was young, his hands hurt when he wrote. He stopped frequently, rubbed his hands, wrists, fingers.

He had a very odd pencil grip.

His pencil pressure was uneven and unusually strong - he pushed so hard on his pencil when trying to write that his papers usually had holes in them and looked crumpled.

His handwriting was really large, he couldn't follow lines on paper, and he would run words off the page in the middle of the word.

He did *not* follow the normal description of typical handwriting development that starts with lines of scrawls and turns into letters then words etc. He never scrawled. When he was in a Montessori preschool where children were allowed to choose the area they worked in, he never once chose the activities that included painting, drawing, anything remotely related to handwriting type activities (this was in stark constrast to the other kids in his preschool, who had their folders jammed full of "work" to take home each week :)).

He refused to do homework and did everything he could to delay completing written work in school when he was in K-2. We knew he was beyond smart - that was so obvious from his verbal communication. Starting in first grade he had homework packets, usually simple math worksheets. Math that we knew he was capable of completing - and he would just sit and stare at the worksheets as if he was totally lost. When we encouraged him to get started, he would crumple the worksheets up in frustration and toss them across the room and stomp and yell and scream.


It would help us to see the subtest scores - your ds has scatter, but is the scatter also present among subtests within Verbal, PRI, etc or just among VIQ, PRI etc. FWIW my ds at 7 had high VIQ and high PRI, WMI was around 110 (I can't remember for sure without looking it up), and his PSI was much lower, with the score in coding really low compared to his other scores (he had > 12 point scatter between subtest scores and > 40 pt scatter between VIQ/PRI and processing speed).

When I look (with my *very* untrained eye) at your ds' scores, the scatter between VIQ and PRI stands out more than the scatter in VIQ/PRI vs processing speed - but that might look very different in the actual subtests.

The other thing I'll add is that handwriting can be very messy and odd for a number of different reasons other than dysgraphia. I have two younger dds, both of whom have had messy handwriting with lots of reversals in the early years of elementary school. Our neuropsych actually looked at my older dd's handwriting samples and automatically said "Yep, you have another dysgraphic child" before her evaluation... but the problem wasn't dysgraphia, it was a vision challenge, and her handwriting (and reading skills) improved tremendously after vision therapy.

My younger dd (8 years old, just completed 2nd grade) has handwriting that looks very much like your ds' handwriting - very similar spelling too. She also can write long detailed creative sentences. She hasn't been through a full neuropsych evaluation but she's been through an educational assessment to determine if she is dyslexic because she also struggled quite a bit with reading even though she's also clearly intellectually gifted. Her educational assessment revealed a significant weakness in associative memory. She had the WJ-III Test of Cognitive Abilities instead of the WISC, so I am not certain which test on a WISC would show up as low for her, but fwiw, her processing speed subtests were extremely high, among her higher scores. She doesn't have dysgraphia but she *does* have a challenge that requires accommodations and remediation.

So - sorry for the long post! FWIW, I understand your concern. I think you don't have all the information you need to know whether or not your ds has a challenge or if his handwriting is developing typically. I'd look for some of the things I mentioned about my ds re dysgraphia, also look for signs such as can your ds tell right from left, does he have difficulty with other fine motor skills such as tying shoes etc. And I'd ask for a referral for a neuropsych eval or ask for the school to do an evaluation to look for LD. If you can afford a private eval (or if insurance will pay for it), that's the route I'd choose simply because you'll get more complete info, more detailed testing, and no bias.

Gotta run - I hope some of this was helpful!

polarbear

You already have excellent advice, so I'll only add that for my son, he would have never written that much but would have edited down what he wanted to say to the least words possible so he had fewer words to get through. Had he dictated the story, even at that age, it would have covered several pages. When he had to write, it would exhaust him to the point of doing poorly at everything else afterwards. He didn't even see the red line on the left side of his paper so that often by the end there would only be room for one word because he'd drifted so far right.

He also had difficulty with speech, couldn't zip, tie, or button until 4th grade (tying in late 5th). He can't ride a bike. He was late to learn to swim.

He doesn't keep things in working memory, will forget the third step of an instruction if given three in a row, and loses things (doesn't "see" the homework in his folder, can't find a shoe despite it being visible if it is around other objects), etc.

So I guess I'd look at the whole of it - is it just hand writing or are there other things cropping up that seem "off" from what you'd expect?

We still don't (and probably will never) have a diagnosis of dysgraphia for my DD 13 because the OT "cannot legally diagnose anything" in our state. The ed psych wouldn't diagnose because WISC scores were too high, but refered us to the OT. The pediatrician won't diagnose because it is an OT eval. ... and so it goes. The OT agrees, off the record, that we are dealing with dysgraphia and DD now has a 504 in place with no official diagnosis.

That being said, what it looks like in her is a horrible pencil grip; incorrect formation of letters; pain in arm from writing; avoiding writing assignments or intentionally "dumbing them down" to write as little as possible.

She also has MAJOR spelling issues. She reads on a very high level, has an incredible oral vocabulary, but will avoid using more advanced vocabulary in writing because she cannot spell. When she uses a computer, though, she has won essay contests and has had several poems and essays published.

When she took the SAT for talent search this spring, she had to copy a sentence in cursive for the honor code. It took her 15 minutes to copy one sentence, she had to ask how to form some letters (which she had been taught previously), and she still had spelling errors copying words that were right in front of her.

Although she is in an accelerated math sequence, we see many issues with careless mistakes in math -- mostly from copying issues when she rewrites the problem.

Whether or not it is directly related to dysgraphia, she has diagnosed hand/eye coordination issues (6th percentile on the Beery VMI). She was 11 before she could tie her shoes without using "bunny ears." Now that she's in middle school, she has difficulty opening her lock on the locker. We have also seen some issues in band.

She definitely deals with working memory issues, but as we were able to see from the SB-V, in her case, her deficiency is mostly with non-verbal working memory.

My son's dysgraphia wasn't diagnosed until he was 11 and then we were told it was too late for occupational therapy. We tried to get help earlier but when he was tested at seven they told us his handwriting was normal. They should have listened to me. They should have tested him longer. That is when his problems appear. Because they didn't diagnose the dysgraphia they didn't look for physical reasons for his handwriting and fine motor issues. They didn't notice the hypermobile finger joints or listen to me when I told them about the hypotonia that he was born with. They just told us to use Handwriting without Tears and that did not fix the problems.

When my son was tested by an educational psychologist the month he turned seven he was at a 4th grade level for math after homeschooling for one year. The educational psychologist told me that he thought he could have scored higher if he hadn't refused to use pencil and paper. He learned most of what he knew by playing math games online.

His reading level tested higher than the math that but I think he would have scored even higher if they had let him start the reading test at a higher level. His eyes got tired faster than other kids. He quit reading when his eyes got tired. His spelling score was grade levels ahead but I know he would have tested even higher if he would have been allowed to give his answers verbally. He had to quit when his hands started hurting. The educational psychologist noticed the fatigue and said he needed to be tested over more than one session because of it.

When our insurance agreed to pay for testing at age 11 the neuropsychologist would only test him if it was done all in one day because that is just the way it was done and they would not change their rules. It was done through a university. The neuropsychologist tested him even though he was getting a migraine. She felt it wouldn't make that much difference in his scores and he still scored in the verbally gifted range but there were things that didn't make sense and I know from my experience with migraines that the migraine was the reason for some of it. I told her this and she didn't like that I was questioning her.

I remember when he was seven he wouldn't write anything down to figure out answers. When he did write, he would sometimes write 5s and 2s backwards which would cause him to end up with the wrong answer. He had trouble keeping columns straight. We tried graph paper and he hated it. I had to act as his scribe and we had to continue homeschooling. It was the only thing that worked for us.

Because he had so many problems writing he learned to combine steps so he could do as little writing as possible. He is 14 now and he uses IXL for extra practice in algebra. He is good at coming up with weird mental math ways of getting the answers. I only insist he figure out the answers the traditional way using a whiteboard and marker on a few of the problems and let him figure out ways to get the answer with as little writing as possible. He is only at grade level in math now because the writing in math was such a problem that he avoided it and the painful scoliosis brace he has to wear made it even harder for him to deal with any other issues. Last year he went three months without doing any math at all.

When he finally got the diagnosis of dysgraphia at age 11 we were told that it went along with his dyspraxia. The strange thing is that unlike a lot of kids with dyspraxia he isn't clumsy at all until he gets tired which happens faster for him than other kids. I noticed this when I watched him practicing dances in his musical theater class with other kids. The classes were two hours and he was fine for about 45 minutes and then he his fatigue would affect his performance. It was the same with handwriting and piano unless we broke it up throughout the day. He has low muscle tone and his top finger joints bend way back which causes difficulty in writing and in cutting with a knife, yet he taught himself to type and types about 60 wpm, can text very quickly on his iPhone, and had no trouble learning to take out his new contact lenses but has to do it with his left hand even though he is right handed. Actually, he seemed ambidextrous in kindergarten so we encouraged him to write only with his right hand. He often eats with his left hand.

I also remember that my son would sometimes mix capital and lower case letters when he was younger. I think it might have been because he couldn't practice writing as much as other kids without pain. He was not eligible for occupational therapy in kindergarten because he wasn't failing and this was a requirement for receiving OT where we live.