Thanks Portia. DS has sloppy handwriting and has difficulty keeping the letters between the lines on the paper. DD 4 already has nicer handwriting. He also struggles to use capitals and punctuation at the end of a sentence. Spacing is an issue if he does not use his finger. When he was younger and just learning to write we could not get him to sit down to do it and he would not color either. He does not seem to have a hard time with ideas but the act of writing. His teacher was concerned that his writing does not match his reading ability at his last conference. I am not sure what this means but I will follow up with her again this Spring.
This was my DD in first grade. All of it. She didn’t put spaces between words until third grade. She still can’t do capitalization or punctuation consistently.
Do get further testing. DD9 has a very specific and pinpoint visual processing deficit that can be seen very clearly in her Motor Free Visual Processing Test results. She was also diagnosed by the behavioral optometrist with dysgraphia.
She looked absolutely like a child with ADHD during the writing portions of testing.
Also, I believe the discrepancy between her high FSIQ and average processing speed causes her to look a bit inattentive.
Her reading comprehension was really high even though she showed signs of having dyslexia on dyslexia screeners. Her spelling is affected.
Other than the dyslexic spelling her struggles are strictly visual spatial.
I will add that I’m beginning to think dysgraphia, while an easy description of her writing struggles, does not carry an accurate prognosis for her. Her word choice and sentence fluency have become very advanced—and this is with pen and paper and an inability to fit her writing in the lines.
She would probably be best characterized as having “stealth dysgraphia” now.
So when mixing high IQ with an LD consider the experts’ prognoses with a grain of salt.
