Originally Posted by DeeDee
I second what Aculady said.

And I would be very careful about assuming it's just careless or sloppy work. It may be-- but if there's an underlying problem, you don't want to be punishing a child for something that's not their fault.

Piano proficiency is very different from handwriting-- handwriting is not only a motor/planning issue but also needs the language centers of the brain, which are bypassed in piano.

I'll third what Aculady said and second what DeeDee added. My very dysgraphic ds is a very talented piano player - handwriting and reading/playing music are two very different processes. Some kids with dysgraphia have trouble learning to play a musical instrument but others don't.

Re reading, if she's 7 and reading ahead of grade level, I'm not sure I'd push her - I'd be much more interested in seeing her find books she loves and develop a love of reading than worrying about the specifics of what she is or isn't reading. OTOH, I have a 7 year old who has struggled with reading (relative to her other strengths, her reading is at grade level but she is far ahead of grade level in other areas and complains about how hard reading and spelling are). DD does the word-substitution thing you mentioned when she's reading out loud to us - to me that's an indication that she's not looking at all the words but putting together what she's reading from context. If she's just doing this because she's going fast that's ok, but if you see other signs of potential reading red flags then I'd follow up with a closer look (in our dd's case we see other things too).

I'm also curious how you know that your dd is a visual spatial thinker - is it from something she's described to you? Or based on reading about vs folks online? The reason I ask is, when our dysgraphic ds first started struggling in school, we attributed a lot of his behaviors to visual spatial theory - but there was much more to it. He really is a visual spatial kid, but I don't think we really knew that for sure until he was a bit older and could clearly describe (over and over again in different situations) his thinking process. If we'd just continued to attribute everything to that we would have missed some challenges that he really needed help with.

Best wishes,

polarbear