My 12 year old son got a 98 for the semester in his writing composition class, the first class he had taken except for musical theater and piano, since he was in kindergarten. He is the youngest student in the class. Most of the other kids are two years older.
We never told the teacher about the dysgraphia. He never asked for any accommodations. At the beginning of each class he had to write a paragraph in six minutes on a topic the teacher wrote on the board. He was always the last one to finish writing but he did it and always got the maximum number of points. The teacher could read his writing. Since she also makes some of her letters in an unusual way, she doesn't count off for handwriting as long as it is legible. She can't draw well either; she uses stick figures when she draws, just like my son. She studied the dictionary when she was a child, just like my son. When she gave assignment to write about the best mistake he ever made, my son wrote that the best mistake he ever made was not coloring in the lines because it was the reason he is homeschooled. He got an A+ and a "very interesting" comment on that paper, which encouraged him to write more and take risks, like writing a poem to match the tone of some work of art or music. He got a 100 on that one.
I took notes for him in the class since no electronic devices were allowed in the classroom, but he didn't read them before he took the semester exam because he was sick and didn't have time to look at them before the test, but he did well anyway. I think he did well because he reads a lot and grammar has always been easy for him. He could spell really well too. The physical act of writing was the problem because he has low muscle tone. The neurologist recently noticed that the muscles in his hands are smaller than most people's. Even with the difficulties, my son managed to do all the writing on a three page test because he was determined to do it.
I can usually hear my son writing because he presses down on the pencil harder than everyone else. I don't know if he reversed any letters on his test, something he does when he is very tired or sick, but this is an occasional glitch that he deals with. He was very tired after the test.
So it sounds like everything is going really well, right? Well, at my family's Christmas party my son had trouble reading one of the Christmas cards. He said out loud that it was written in cursive and he couldn't read it. After we left, family members discussed how my child could not read in cursive. My dad was worried about this, on top of having to take care of my disabled mother.
As a homeschool mom this kind of thing annoys me when it comes from someone else, but when it is family, it really bothers me. I had to explain to my dad that my son, because of his dysgraphia, tried both printing and cursive and I let him choose the method that was easiest and fastest for him. We ended up modifying the cursive. I let him use printed capitals when he had trouble with some of the cursive capitals, but he still decided to stick with printing and it is working for him. I get the feeling that my dad still thinks this might be a problem because he said this was not how he learned to write in school. I told him I thought it was a reasonable accommodation for the disability. I checked to see if my son had forgotten how to read in cursive and he can read it just fine, if it is legible. My son is not the only person in my family with bad handwriting.
