Originally Posted by sydness
Interesting thoughts bluemagic. We live it a very educated area and it seems every kid has a passion and gift is one area or another. Parents shell out all sorts of money for private instruction so their kids can be competitive. My 13 year old is very passionate about ballet. We do tend to pay a lot for this, but since she is so passionate about it, we feel the expense is justified.

I think it is easy to lose sight of the fact that she is infact 10 years old. She has a lot of things to try and it's an exciting time with low pressure to explore.

As far as ambidextrous. I think I'm not clear on the actual definition. She was not crossing her midline at age 5 and had not chosen a dominant hand. She was right handed by first grade though.

I fixed her pencil grip the summer before first grade and it is beautiful now! The school was not worried but she had a four finger grasp!

She has always been left legged and a lefty when she was in gymnastics...another thing she was very good at, but didn't like the pressure.

She is left-eyed and turns left in dancing.

BUT she is right handed. Maybe this is part of her issues. Might it also have something to do with reversing letters, numbers? This part of her is a mystery to me. She worked sooo incredibly hard to fix this. I can see her pausing before b's and d's still to think.

No wonder her processing is slow. Imagine you had to consider all the directions of a letter each time your wrote it?

I wish I understood this more. I don't know any other children her age who do this. The school is not addressing it. They encourage her to type.

Your stories are very helpful to me.

I go from having so much hope for her and thinking she will outgrow the struggle to feeling like maybe we should just give her the easy classes in school and not worry about it.

But in the end it sounds like it is a balance and she may need support sometimes and teaching her to ask for help and advocate for herself may be the best thing I can do her for her at this point.
Ambidextrous is not something to be worried about, it's fairly rare and quite special IMO. But it might explain not being able to understand left-from-right easily. My husband is ambidextrous yet appears as if he is right handed since default in our society is to teach kids to do things right handed. We live in a right handed world. Just because she writes with her right hand doesn't mean she isn't ambidextrous. In fact your description of her being left-footed makes me think she probably is. What my husband can do that I CAN NOT (broke my thumb and was so frustrated for 2 months because I couldn't write) is while he uses he right most of the time he can quickly come up to speed doing things with his left. Basically he can learn to use either hand and isn't inherently "handed". He can write beautifully with both hands, eat comfortably with either, etc. And what I can do is instantly tell which is my right hand because I just "know" which is my dominate hand.

I also live in a very educated area and although it may SEEM like every kids has a passion by 10. This is not necessarily true. My kids are 21 & 17 and they have had friends. I've seen these passions come & go. I've seen kids which passions at this age become bored and move onto other things in H.S. And I've seen kids become passionate bout things in H.S. It's OK for a kid not to have a passion as a child IMO. And I've seen kids who's parents have dumped tons of $$ into something like sports, ballet, or other activity give it up in a fit of disgust and frustration in H.S. (Or after H.S.) There is a lot of pressure on kids to stay in activities their parents have dumped lots of money into. And not to discourage you I've also seen kids who stay committed and still love their activity well into adulthood. You just have to go into it with the right attitude. I don't regret my daughter taking 5 years of theater classes and going into photography. Those classes were fun & good for her.

P.S. Comment on the posts after this. My DS got a 99% on the OLSAT in 3rd grade. He was tested with low processing speed in H.S. Certain types of tests he has very little problem with while others really bog him down.

Last edited by bluemagic; 02/28/16 04:28 PM.