Hi ChasingTwo,
You've received a lot of excellent advice above - I'm sorry I won't have time to chime in with more details until later - busy day here! I do have a ds with both DCD and dysgraphia, who's now in high school so I'm happy to share our experiences, and also will add that this has been the best place I've found for sharing and receiving support from other parents.
I will check into cowriter.
My ds used cowriter when he was in mid-upper elementary and it was wonderful for him, at that point in time. It increased his ability to produce written output signficantly, but more significantly made it possible for him to work on content vs having to spend significant amounts of time checking spelling. The quality of his grammar punctuation etc also improved dramatically, not because he had challenges with those things, but because it got him past his dysgraphic challenges. So overall, best thing about cowriter for our ds was lack of need to revise work!
That said, he left cowriter behind because he didn't like that it took over the function of the arrow keys on the right side of the keyboard, and that really hindered him in some way. I never fully understood it, but by the 7th grade he was adamant he didn't want to use cowriter anymore. There's another word prediction program out there for the laptop - I don't remember the name of it anymore, our neuropsych recommended it - but I think it had the same issue with arrow key function.
Our ds switched to an iPad in 7th grade, and the word prediction that's built into the iPad worked for the most part just as well for him as cowriter. (which is amazing to me... because it totally drives me nuts lol!).
Is there a good program to start teaching keyboarding at home?
Thanks!
I don't know if it even exists anymore, but all of my kids learned how to type using BBC Mat Typing - two of my kids had a teacher who used it in class, and our neuropsych initially recommended it for ds. The one piece of advice we were given and that proved really useful re typing - don't require that your child learn traditional touch typing - it's tough for small hands to master, and it's not necessary to get an improvement on output from typing over handwriting. We were told to just let ds figure out a finger-key system on is own, even if it looks like hunt-and-peck, and that has worked well for him. None of my now-teens use traditional touch typing but my nt teens type relatively fast and ds types not-so-fast but that's due to the limitations of DCD more so than typing system.
Hope some of that helps - I'll come back later with a few more tips.
Best wishes,
polarbear
