I totally agree with the comments above. DD has now had 6 years of OT and really, truly, could not write a legible 2 sentence note by hand if her life depended on it. She can now hold a pencil and form letters but the written result is not anything I can read. Sad but true.
To follow up on aeh's post - when she was little DD would dictate *amazing* stories - full of detail, colorful phrases, interesting story lines, complex sentences with advanced vocabulary, etc. Truly amazing. By contrast when she had to handwrite homework she would take an hour to write the required 5 sentences - counting out the five shortest words to use in 5 word sentences to meet the minimum requirement. Not any hint of what she was really able to do when the dysgraphia (and dyslexia) were removed from the equation. Scribing was the first accommodation introduced, then modified test papers so she would not have to rewrite sentences or even words from a word bank, then alternate testing for spelling. We finally removed spelling completely - she will not master it no matter how hard she tries. My goals for her are to be able encode well enough for word prediction to guess what she is trying to write and decode well enough to select the correct option from the list.
Fortunately we live in an age of Assistive technology and that is what is saving her. I realized early on she was making almost no progress with handwriting and started to request that she be introduced to keyboarding in 1st grade. School OT refused - she was adamant that keyboarding was not age appropriate before 5th grade. No amount of arguing, pleading or common sense could get her to budge. Ironically once the state switched over to computerized standardized testing kindergarteners started to be introduced to keyboarding so the district's scores wouldn't go down...
Platypus is right that most of us with dysgraphic kids really seem to focus more on the work arounds. For my DD it's an iPad - primarily with the app CoWriter. It allows her to switch between voice to text and keyboarding so if it can't recognize a word she is saying she can type it in. She can then have the machine utilize text to voice, speaking the word prediction options so she can select the correct one. The voice to text feature built in to the iPad seems to work best for her (better than Dragon or anything else AT specialist tried with her.) We were told to make sure she has an iPad 2 or above.
I had read here that some kids had better luck with cursive - less starting and stopping, picking the pencil up from the page, smoother writing, etc. The same OT who blocked introducing AT (really a lovely person who I like very much personally just did a lousy job understanding my DD's OT needs...) refused to introduce cursive. At the end of 3rd grade a different OT suggested as an option. It has been s-l-o-w going - a year and a half for DD to learn all the letters. I think at the IEP meeting at the end of this year (5th) the OT will declare that we have hit the wall on handwriting - she's come as far as she will be able to. Last year when I asked if it was worth continuing to work on handwritten DD said that she wanted to continue because she might find herself in a situation where she didn't have access to technology and would need to be able to write a note. Made sense so we continued.
In our case working on keyboarding at home didn't help. DD is so 2E she needed direct instruction from the OT to even develop a strategy to find the keys on the keyboard. Some parents have had great success getting their kids typing at home. Depends on the kid and their level of disability. My DD receives 3 1/2 hours a week of OT in school to address all of this. She's making progress but it's really the work arounds that are helping.
