Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional dyspraxia and learning cursive

Now that we are back into homeschooling, I really need to see how I can best help DS6 with his handwriting issues due to his Dyspraxia. His OT at school has told us that she will drop him to consultation basis instead of his normal session each week with her as stated on his IEP since we are homeschooling and I was a little miffed at this...his needs are still the same whether he homeschools or is in a public school classroom - it is very clear that he is struggling with writing and fine motor coordination....so we are teaching him typing skills and had thought about jumping into teaching him cursive through Handwriting without tears....he knows how to form all his letters but it honestly looks like chicken sratch - I know that cursive is easier for many people to write because it flows and is easier on your hand muscles to produce. Anyone had luck trying to introduce cursive early to help with handwriting issues?

No direct experience but I have read that cursive can work in a situation like this. Also, what kind of pencils do you use? I find that mechanical pencils flow easier and require less pressure. DS's hand would fatigue quickly b/c he had a death grip on his pencil. Well, I did pay quite a bit for pencil refills but using a mechanical pencil taught him not to grip so tightly since he had to try to not break the lead. I started him w/ the 0.7mm lead - the thickest.

We actually found some shorter triangular pencils (maybe 6 inches long) with a very soft lead when we were teaching DS to write. The soft lead means they don't have to push so hard and the shorter/triangular pencil is easier for small hands. They were great!

Unfortunately, we are out of them now (the soft lead dulls fast so you must sharpen regularly) and a web search hasn't turned any up yet. Perhaps, we'll try mechanical ones.

I know Handwriting Without Tears offers short pencils too but I haven't tried them.

As for the cursive, Belle, I too have heard that it can help but don't have any direct experience with it.

Were they the German ones that Waldorf schools use, sittin pretty? My kids have had some something like those which you describe, and we got them from Mercurius--Ferbys, I think they were called??

peace
minnie

When my 11 year old son with motor dyspraxia and hypotonia was in kindergarten, he could print all the letters of the alphabet well enough that most people could make out what they were, but the letters looked very shaky and were all different sizes and he was very slow at writing. We told the teacher about the hypotonia, which is all we knew he had at the time, and she thought more practice coloring in the lines would fix the problem, which is one reason we decided to homeschool. He wasn't eligible for OT in our state because he was not failing.

A first grade teacher and mother of gifted boys looked at his writing and said "typical gifted boy" so my son never got to see an OT in school or anywhere else for his handwriting. The OT he saw for six sessions only worked with him on sensory issues.

When he homeschooled his first grade year, I had him continue to practice printing the way he had been taught in school and it just didn't seem to look any better or get any faster, in fact it seemed like the more he practiced, the worse it looked and he complained that his hands hurt. He often broke the pencil lead when he wrote. He couldn't get his thoughts on paper because the physical act of writing took so much out of him. We started using Handwriting without Tears his second year of homeschooling because so many people recommended it. He had worked really hard to learn to print the way he was already printing and didn't want to change. He took the HWT book and scratched out the word "out" making it look like Handwriting with Tears. I really couldn't tell that the printing book helped him that much.

If I had it to do all over again I would have switched to cursive at that point. It would have been easier for him because he was eager to learn cursive, but I thought he needed to stick with printing to get faster at that because that is what is friends were using. I had not yet figured out that my child needed to do what was best for him and not worry about what the other kids were doing.

I didn't let him start learning cursive until he was almost 9 and it did work better for him. He didn't have to worry about the spaces in between words or occasionally reversing letters or the sizes of the letters and his cursive was more legible than mine. He liked to point that out too. But as well as cursive worked for him, speed was still a problem. He still can't write fast enough to get his thoughts on paper and if he has to write very much, legibility decreases and I am talking about a few paragraphs, so he types. He still hates the physical act of writing so much that I still have to make him write in his journal and he tries to talk me into acting as his scribe.

He uses mechanical pencils because we got tired of constantly having to sharpen pencils and he learned to not press down on the pencil as hard.

He finally at age 11 has a dysgraphia diagnosis along with the dyspraxia.