So if I make him follow along will the quantum of improvement really be worth the time and struggle involved? Handwriting work with DS does not produce enough noticeable improvement to justify the time (and the angst) involved. If it really produces marked results I will heave a sigh and be the bad guy again.
Re handwriting, are you talking about actual handwriting (penmanship etc) or producing written expression?
I'm going to be coming at this from a perspective of a mom with 2e kids with challenges, so my answer will most likely be different from the answer of a parent who's child (gifted or not) has never struggled with reading or handwriting.
I also have a dh who is a very very slow reader who, as far as I can tell, has never *ever* as an adult read a book for pleasure and doesn't often read much of anything for work. I am guessing that, based on the dyslexia and dysgraphia that is showing up among his family's generation of children - both he and his father have/had some degree of dyslexia or other type of reading challenge. The good news is - he's extremely intelligent, has a *great* career, has achieved quite a bit in his life, is an amazing and loving father, a kind and considerate and caring citizen, and he's happy. He also derives quite a bit of pleasure from listening to NPR podcasts
During the course of raising a child with severe dysgraphia I've done a ton of searching for stories of successful adults who had to overcome challenges in school, and it's really actually quite easy to find stories of very successful adults with dyslexia who, even as adults, struggle with reading and rely on other adults to help - yet they are CEOs, entrepreneurs, successful, happy - usually much happier as adults than as students in school.
So fwiw, I don't for one second believe that a child who struggles with reading is doomed to a life of no-gainful-employment. As technology moves forward and becomes much more widespread in our daily lives, the whole concept of "reading" is evolving and listening to books is just going to continue to grow. Along with that, so many of our software programs and iDevices now have text-to-voice capabilities that it's not just LD kids who are using that technology - many very NT people are too
And the kids who are students now happily listening instead of always reading are going to be the adults of tomorrow who are living with, working with and socializing with our reading- and writing- challenged kids. Their adult world going into and coming out of college is going to be much different than ours was.
(stepping off my momentary soapbox....)
My take on raising a child with an LD is that you remediate what you can and equally importantly you help them find strategies and accommodations to deal with the rest so that they can shine in the areas where their skills are strong and where their passions lie.
Our ds is dysgraphic. We were told in 2nd grade that we should tutor him in handwriting to the extent that he could develop it, but not push for perfect or even for more. What was most important for him was moving him to keyboarding and letting go of handwriting. I've had other parents and teachers who haven't lived with dysgraphia or don't understand view that as giving up or depriving ds of a very important skill but the reality is a) he will never become proficient at handwriting and when he uses handwriting it supresses his ability to spell/punctuate correctly and prevents him from processing the thoughts he wants to communicate and reality b) he doesn't need to use handwriting - the technology to keyboard and use voice-to-text is readily accessible to him and widely accepted in the world outside of school.
I don't disagree that reading is a very important skill, but I think that with reading challenges as well as writing, there are some kids/adults who are never going to become proficient to the level that we as parents might expect or hope that they would achieve. As has been mentioned before in this thread, audiobooks are a tremendous gift that allows students to continue to develop their reading comprehension skills while not holding them back due to decoding skills, as well as giving kids who struggle with reading a chance to feed and develop a *love* of literature and a way to access knowledge that matches their cognitive abilities.
So with reading challenges I'd approach it with a similar approach to what we were recommended for our dysgraphic ds - remediate what you can but don't make that the overwhelming only "reading" your child is exposed to - be sure he/she has an opportunity to listen to books that are a good cognitive match and also books that he/she enjoys. Once you get to whatever point it is where the extra work being put into learning reading isn't producing any results, rethink it again, is there something else that you can do.. but if not... it's ok to let it go.
There are also downsides to continuing to push remediation past the point of large positive gains - as students get older they can burn out on the remediation, and are also losing time to it that they could be spending learning in areas where learning comes easily and is fun - and this can be extremely defeating for some children. Our ds is still working with an SLP once a week for written expression but we gave up handwriting tutoring way back in 3rd grade and never *ever* looked back. The reason he's still working with his SLP is it's still helping and his abilities are still obviously developing over what they would be if he gave it up - and he's old enough now to see that it helps so *he* doesn't want to give it up.
I personally don't believe handwriting tutoring for a dysgraphic child is going to help much for most dysgraphic kids, and our neuropsych would agree with that - if you've given it a good try for your ds and you aren't seeing gains I'd move on and instead focus on having him learn to type and use other types of AT. I can't answer our question re whether or not continuing with extra work in reading will produce results for your ds - one challenge with reading is finding the type of learn-to-read program that fits the learning style and challenges each student has. The one thing I *would* absolutely do is look at building reading skills as *one* isolated area to work on, and be sure to use audiobooks etc for the other academics and for daily reading-for-comprehension etc.
polarbear
