Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Hates writing

So, DD (just turned 6) really hates writing. However, she loves drawing and is an excellent artist for her age. (I couldn't figure out how to attach an image file of one of her drawings here.) She also has great fine motor skills. Loves making things with small beads. She holds her pencil correctly and has since she was very young. BUT she really hates writing. She wrote one short sentence this morning and it took a very long time. I also told her that tonight she has to write thank you notes from her birthday party and she complained.
It doesn't seem like dysgraphia because of her good fine motor skills. Do you think it is just her age or something else?

Thanks for your input.

No answers here, but your DD sounds exactly like my DS7 in the ways you mention. He loves to draw (even draws with 3D perspective), but is very slow (but extremely neat) in the writing department. It's hard to say at his age whether he has an LD or this is just an area of relative weakness for him that will develop at a different pace. So we've adopted a wait-and-see approach but it's on our radar, for sure.

It's easy think that relative weaknesses in gifted kids, when compared with what they can do, can seem really glaring, yet when compared to more typical kids is right about average.

How is her fluency with arithmetic? DS has high math reasoning ability yet average (even slightly below average) fluency. This has a tendency to mask what he think about in math, since so much at this age is geared towards fluency.

For what it's worth, I don't believe that dysgraphia has anything to do with fine motor skills. It's more related to dyslexia.

Wow! Yeah they do sound the same. DD loves math and also has high math reasoning ability but the fluency is not there.

So far she has written 2 thank you notes in 2 days. The first day she wrote the friend's name on the envelope then wrote "Thank" and asked me to do the rest. This morning, she told me that she would only write the 1, 2 or 3 letter words and I should write the words that have 4 or more letters.

I was trying to ask her why she didn't want to write. I asked if it made her hand hurt; she said no. I asked if the letters were too hard to make; she said no. She said, "It's just boring."

What could be going on here?

I don't know, but it's possible to have good fine motor skills otherwise, but still have dysgraphia. With dysgraphia handwriting is messy, though, and there are usually a lot of errors like writing things backwards, forming letters incorrectly, not putting spaces between words, etc. Short samples might look Ok but beyond that it goes downhill.

When you tell her to write, is she copying from something else? And is she just starting school? Can she write her name or does she have problems with that too? I think if this is the first time you are asking her to write, and she hasn't had it in school before, it's probably normal. If it doesn't start to improve within a few weeks, and she's doing it daily in school, then there's probably something else going on.

Dysgraphia? DS7 was assessed as dysgraphic and writing is very, very difficult for him. I can see him thinking about each letter before he writes it. And he muddles them up pretty easily. SLowly, slowly getting more fluid. But it's a grind. Edit to add: DS also has super fine motor skills outside the context of writing.

Sidenote: "boring" is nothing but a catch all for all things DS doesn't want to do. "Boring" may actually be boring, but it also may mean "hard," "not what I want to do right now," or "useless" (as in doing rote exercises for things he already knows).

Yeah she definitely writes some letters backwards (though I read this is still common at her age) and she forms some of the letters in a weird way.
When I was asking her to write the thank you notes, I had everything written on another paper and she just had to copy it.
She can write her name (though she does this with a mixture of capital and lowercase letters) and this is her second year in school. Last year in Kindergarten I know they did a writing workshop 3 days a week.

If she's copying, she probably shouldn't be writing them backwards. Otherwise, I agree it's normal at that age. I think you should definitely keep an eye on this. DS has some pretty severe writing issues (at age 8, his writing is still very hard to read), he has an IEP and is pulled for services, including OT and written expression, but he didn't have problems to the degree you are describing in K or 1st grade. In the beginning of K he was able to copy sentences, just more messy and slowly than the other kids. I would talk to the teacher and see what he/she says about it, and whether she acts the same way in class.

We see this with our DS7 all the time. "Boring" doesn't actually mean boring, it means "anything I don't want to do."

Ditto to all the advice you've received above. My ds is dysgraphic, and we didn't see it in his schoolwork really until 2nd grade because the writing tasks were so minimal and the expectations so low (plus it is truly developmentally typical for some kids to still be reversing letters like b/d and p/q up through the end of 1st grade.

A few things about dysgraphia:

* It's not an issue with physical fine motor skills - it's a disconnect in the neurological ability to develop automaticity. My ds, like many dysgraphics, is a talented artist who can draw with amazing precision and detail. He can't remember how to form letters - he has to rethink how to draw them each time he uses handwriting, for each word and each letter. When you're drawing pictures, it's new every time, and you're drawing from something you either see in front of you or in your head. Your pencil also doesn't leave the paper frequently like it does with handwriting. Very different process from handwriting.

* There are a few different "flavors" of dysgraphia. Some dysgraphia is connected to fine motor, some to visual processing. Some dysgraphics are extremely challenged with spelling while others aren't. Some have odd pencil grips, some don't. I am sorry that I can't recall exactly which symptom fits which type of dysgraphia, but if you google you should be able to find the info easily.

* Most dysgraphic will be able to tell you a story or answer a question in *significantly* more detail verbally than when using handwriting. You could try scribing for your dd on her homework or making up your own "test" to see if there's a significant improvement when the burden of handwriting is removed.

These are also a few things I'd watch for (in addition to what's already been mentioned above in previous replies):

* Does she hold her wrist while she writes? Or her elbow? Does she use good posture or bend around or hold her head in an odd position?

* Does she break her pencil lead frequently?

* Do her papers look crumbled up when she's done writing?

* What does her handwriting (and output) look like relative to classmates?

* What does her teacher say about her handwriting?

And I'll second what Elizabeth and suevv noted about the word "boring" - it was a real catch-all answer at our house up until around the beginning of 4th grade - when our ds had a bit of a developmental growth spurt in which he was able to describe how he was feeling with accuracy.

One other question I'm curious about - does your dd resist writing when the task might be fun? Instead of thank-you notes (which 2 out of 3 of my kids would resist, whether or not they are dysgraphic lol!)... does she like shopping or cooking? Could you ask her to write a list or recipe out and see if she is still really slow and begging to not do the work? Or ask her to write a caption on one of her pictures? Just anything that was writing that was related to something that was fun for her

Best wishes,

polarbear