My ds12 has developmental coordination disorder, which resulted in severe dysgraphia as well as other fine motor challenges. When ds was first diagnosed at the end of 2nd grade (8 years old) his neuropsych recommended intensive handwriting remediation + OT, then move to keyboarding everything, as well as suggesting that by the time he was in high school he would most likely be using voice-to-text as his means of written expression.
Handwriting remediation didn't work because ds just couldn't do it - he would be exhausted and in severe pain by the end of just a few short lines of printing. He then went through 9 months of handwriting OT and that helped soooo much - he developed legible handwriting, developed good posture and grip while writing, no longer had pain etc.... but still had all the issues with reversals, capitalization totally random and never at the beginning of a sentence, he aced spelling tests but couldn't spell at all while writing sentences, etc. Things that have helped:
1) He has (over time) moved to using a laptop for *all* of his schoolwork. This didn't happen overnight, but could have happened quicker than it did simply because he worried a lot about what other kids would think. However, now that he's further along in school, as he tries different applications one at a time for different types of schoolwork he's hooked - he's finally seeing that the laptop makes schoolwork so much more "doable" for him.
2) Keyboarding alone didn't (and couldn't) solve everything for him - it's still highly impacted by fine motor deficiencies. It helps to use word prediction software while typing - he uses Co:Writer, there are other programs available too.
3) For written docs, using the laptop and software to type helped with the challenges of positioning things on the page. I had to giggle as I read your description of your ds' spacial rambling... our ds still does an occasional math problem using handwriting in class, and he has a math notebook which he's required to keep all of his class notes + homework in. I was just helping him double-check the chronological order of everything earlier this week, and his handwritten papers are almost all on the back of the paper (so the holes for the 3-ring binder are all on the opposite side of where they need to be) plus half of the work is upside down. None of it is anywhere near a margin!
4) DS does most of his math problems on the computer now (not the solving, just the writing). He has math software specifically to make graphs and to write formulas etc which he cuts and pastes back into another program in which he adds text etc. The program he uses isn't intended for kids with learning disabilities to use for schoolwork, it's a program I had that I used to design layouts for a newsletter I published... but ds really likes using it for his math homework because he can easily divide the pages into regions, he can add "boxes" to separate out the areas he works on different problems, and he can paste in graphs etc. He's much more able to make his work fit neatly on one page using this type of a program than he ever was when he was using handwriting on paper.
5) We have Dragon and ds and one of his teachers are very interested in having him start to use it for his written work. We will be working on that as soon as we have some spare time, hopefully over the holidays. DS has tried Dragon previously and really really liked it a lot.
I think the thing that's important to remember (which we were always having to remind ds' teachers about!) is that just because a kid with dysgraphia can produce legible handwriting, it doesn't make the dysgraphia go away - the actual act of handwriting still takes all the child's working memory, so there's nothing left over to focus on the other elements of writing such as spelling, punctuation, grammar, sentence formation, writing content etc.
polarbear
