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My ds is in the 2nd grade and has been having issues this year with math. I just got his progress report and his grades all around have declined dramatically- from A's and B's to B's, C's and an F (in math). How does this happen in one grading period? His teacher says that he gets frustrated with math (which is done in the morning) and mentally shuts down for the rest of the day and wont do anything she asks of him because he is upset. I can definitely see my child doing this.

I recently contacted the school to get them to test him for Dysgraphia and am still waiting to hear back from the school psychologist.

Tonight I found a computer program that makes regrouping fun and I let ds play for practice. To my astonishment he was able to do two digit subtraction with regrouping, with horizontal or vertical layout, in his head. He was actually enjoying doing math, for the first time this school year. Bingo. I truly believe that the problem lies with the fact that is most likely has dysgraphia. He gets confused by his own handwriting and gets frustrated, beats himself up, etc.

I contacted his teacher and asked her to let him work the problems in his head and her reluctant response was that's fine but he still needs to learn how to work them out for tcaps. If he can get the answer in his head, then he already knows how to "work" them, no? He can write them out, that's not the issue, but until I get this dysgraphia stuff figured out...what's the big deal in letting the kid learn the way that is best for him?

We had a teacher like this last year, and she had DD7 so upset by halfway through the school year that we ended up changing schools from private to public for 2nd grade. There are some teachers who are not equipped to handle very bright kids, for whatever reason. This hag had my poor daughter thinking she was bad at math and at spelling, when all it was was that DD wasn't doing the teacher's way. ARGH!!

We had to do a lot of showing DD at home that she COULD do the work, that she wasn't dumb, etc. We even had her in counseling with a school psychologist from the next county, and that helped a lot. Now she has a great teacher who really understands gifted kids, and that has made all of the difference in the world.

Is there a gifted resource at DS's school, or someone else with whom you can discuss this? Or maybe you can talk to the school psychologist yourself? It seems odd that a kid would go down to an F without the teacher having you in for a conference part-way through the grading period.

It was 2nd-grade math in which I staged my one formal protest in public school. Every morning there were multi-columned addition/subtraction problems on the board, which we had to copy and work through. I found the whole thing so mind-numbingly boring, day in and day out, that I started balling up my paper half-finished, and shoving it into my desk. When the teacher started grading papers, she'd notice mine missing, and ask where it was. I'd fold my arms and say, "I didn't do it!"

I suppose she could have given me a zero at this point, and I'd have failed 2nd grade math. Instead, she asked the girl sitting next to me to please find my paper in my desk (I pretended badly that I couldn't find it), and then the teacher would smooth it out, and ask me to please finish. I complied.

I don't think I protested every morning, but it was definitely not an isolated incident, either.

Dysgraphia was not a factor.

We have this same thing with one of my kids. I'm pretty sure he has dysgraphia (testing is pending). He was having a lot of trouble adding and subtracting fractions. I worked with him a bit one night and then walked away. To my astonishment as well, it turned out he could add things like 1 3/5 + 4 6/7 in his head, including simplifying the result, and get the right answer 9 times out of 10.

His teacher is also complaining that he doesn't "show his work." She didn't answer the email I sent asking if he could maybe just write out the work for half his problems.

I completely understand that a child needs to show a stepwise procedure when he clearly doesn't yet grasp the material fully. I also get that it's important to be able to write out the steps, as this process can help down the road when you want to explain something to someone. But as a matter of course in a kid (especially a dysgraphic kid) who fully understands the procedure, it makes no sense to me.

I just found a good source of information about dysgraphia. This handbook was prepared by a school district in Texas. It has buckets of information about the condition, and also has suggestions for how teachers can help kids who have it.

Just as an aside, my son LOVES this game ... we just discovered it.... he is learing his multiplication tables and division through it...

This is my kid, too. He was just identified as having dygraphia but I have had accomodations for a witing disability in place anyway - i.e., scribe, alternatives to writing (like circling answers or just giving them orally, etra time, etc based on his hypotonia. I am not sure how the teacher feels about it, school balked a bit in the beginning but I pushed pretty hard... The accomodations have really made a world of difference. Get that diagnosis offical and start advocating for accomodations... they won;t accomodate unless they have to...