Just out of curiosity, did your son ever take up writing? This is our big issue--
The last time I got to compare his writing with kids his age was at Cub Scouts last fall. He was supposed to write answers to questions on a citizens badge worksheet. The other kids wrote a lot more than my son wrote and writing seemed so effortless for them. My son was hunched over his paper trying to hide it so nobody could see it, just like he does if he is asked to draw something. He didn't write compete sentences, some words that should have been capitalized were not, and his words ran together. At home, where he is allowed to type, he can get his thoughts on paper easily and there are no grammar or capitalization errors, in fact he is very careful about this and he notices other people's grammar and punctuation errors. He just can't put it all together if he has to write by hand. He will type ten times more words than he will write.
I don't make him do book reports or essays or anything like that at home. He does send emails to his sister and types thank you notes. His sentence composition and paragraph composition skills are good, but you would never know it if you looked at something he had to write by hand.
It is really sad that there are teachers in our public school who don't understand dysgraphia and dyspraxia, won't make any attempt to learn about it, and think in my son's case, that making him practice coloring in the lines without learning anything new for an entire year is appropriate education and that he didn't need help for this because he was above grade level in everything else in kindergarten.
I can't imagine what it would be like for him in our public school.
