blackcat, your DD sounds very much like mine. She doesn't have ADHD and reading was not early, but the writing issues are very familiar. In our case handwriting turned out not to be the issue - it's fine now, at 11 - but thoughts to language to composed language on paper has been a huge struggle. It became a bigger problem before it became a smaller one, because the thoughts got more complex when she still hadn't developed the ability to get the simple ones out.
My DD uses web organizers a lot - the kind that look like a radiating pattern of idea bubbles. She has also put cartoons of her story ideas (no words involved, that makes it easier for her) on index cards, put them in chronological order, then made more cards to fill in the story until it worked. Then she could focus on sentence creation to tell the story that was already there in pictures. In 4th grade her teachers understood her issues and accepted the web itself in lieu of a written paragraph for many of her writing assignments; we have worked up since then, and now she can do the actual assignment if she takes it home and spends more time on it.
I wish I knew anything about IEPs, but thought I'd offer up our organizer ideas.
Very interesting. Thanks. So was she actually drawing cartoons? DD hates drawing almost as much as writing.
I did ask her to tell me a story and gave her a starter. She wasn't thrilled about this but did tell me a very short story that made sense. I wonder if she could somehow dictate stories into a recorder then type the dictation.
