Hi BK,
I'm glad to hear the OT is starting. My son also had the SI issues and benifited greatly from OT at age 7. Are these SI issues the same as gifted OverExcitabilities? I don't know and I don't care, as long as the OT helped, and yes, once the touchtyping fairy came to our house everything was much much better.
Here's how it went at our house -
Age 6 -causally introduce various learn to type softwares
Age 7 - heavy duty bribing to use Mavis Beacon for 20 half hour sessions over a 2 month period. Used experience to introduce "skill-type learning" where one tries and tries and tries to no results and then "presto" skill appears. I really wanted DS to know that this is normal.
Age 8 - once in a while when DS wanted a toy or some money, we set up challenges where he earned 25 cents per half hour of Mavis. Note: we had to change the music, eliminate the canned voice that says "good job" as DS felt criticised by it, and cut out the games. He was able to get through most of the keyboard, but typing speed was still around 10 WPM.
Age 9 - Found a mini-game he liked, where he had to spell short letter combinations to manipulate the direction of tetris-like tiles as they fell. He played it compulsivly. Speed rose to 35 wpm. Then he happened to have an interest in "Runescape" an online chat-adventure game, and used his daily 30 minutes of screen time at it.
10th Birthday - 100 WPM, with plenty of inaccuracies, but started to be able to please teachers with his written product if allowed to type. Asynchrouous Development is much less of an issue. Gradeskip facilitated because he can use quick typing to get through megamounds of homework that other kids stay up late to do.
Take home message - idea way to teach a skill that requires lots of boring repitition is to find a way to require the skill in the course of an intersting challenge. Some say that our kids are like Elephants, starving on blades of grass, and needing whole trees to sustain themselves intellectually. My response is that, if you want my elephant to learn those particular blades of grass, it will go better if I make garland out of the grass and hang it one the trees he wants to eat. I've noticed that this also works on myself!
Good luck with the touch typing!
Trinity
