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I knew my son had a problem with writing when I saw that his first-grade journal contained mostly drawings and only a few sentences. In second grade, Austin was still reversing the letters b and d, something most of his peers had outgrown.
His teachers called it laziness, but as he did his homework, I saw him labor to form letters correctly. He worked slowly, erased a lot, and cried. One day, after he'd struggled with a paragraph for two hours, I had him type it at the computer. He was finished in 20 minutes.
Austin has dysgraphia, a learning disability that can accompany attention deficit disorder (ADD ADHD). Dysgraphia affects handwriting, spelling, and the ability to put thoughts on paper. It makes the process of writing maddeningly slow, and the product often illegible. Forming letters requires such effort that a child may forget what he wanted to say in the first place.
The act of writing something down helps most of us to remember, organize, and process information, but children who struggle with the mechanics of writing learn less from assignments than do their peers. Work often goes unfinished, and self-esteem suffers. Fortunately, there are strategies for helping children
