(I find that with motor tasks she needs lots of repetition.) To tie my question back to the spelling, one spelling exercise they do is called a sailboat. They write one letter of the word, then two, then three...It is incredibly frustrating for her and she does not need to do it to learn spelling.
Again, this sounds so much like dysgraphia.
As a mom, I don't want to make her do it because it is counterproductive. Nothing about "sailboating" is useful to her in spelling or in life. Is the math issue like that? Meaning if I don't encourage her to go through the frustration of sitting down and using this written system to decompose numbers and write so many equations, will she be missing something?
Honestly, I don't know if it's counterproductive to repeat the math of if there is truly some nugget of something worthwhile doing tied into it that might be worthwhile doing for the sake of later learning (I am highly skeptical that what you've described is required for a student who understands math lol... but I'll try to be fair to the teacher and let's just suppose that there is something worthwhile in going through this exercise...). So... given that there is something (we're assuming) worth learning through doing the method - jmo, it sounds like the frustration is most likely due to fine motor skills... so do the math without the fine motor. Scribe for her. Have her answer orally. Take the fine motor out of the equation and see how difficult the task is. Whatever you do, don't make her repeat handwriting and drawing tasks for the sake of learning something entirely unrelated to handwriting or drawing.
Working memory isn't bad but it isn't unusually high.
The thing about dysgraphia (if it's dysgraphia) is that when the student is using handwriting, all the available working memory gets used for rethinking how to draw each letter, so a dysgraphic child with even exceptionally high working memory is going to have essentially no working memory available for anything else while using handwriting.
However, she just panics SO MUCH when it comes to writing things down. I think it limits her working memory and that could be a problem as well.
Exactly. Sounds *so* much like dysgraphia! But the good news is - if it's dysgraphia, it's *not* a working memory challenge - once you've accommodated for the dysgraphia (i.e., taken away the handwriting component of the task), you've freed up the working memory.
polarbear
