Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Please tell me about dysgraphia

We had an endless erasure phase about 6 months ago. It drove me absolutely crazy. DS7 would take SO long to do any worksheet he brought home. I kept reminding him it was all "practice writing" and it didn't need to be perfect, but he could not be swayed.

But on the upside, he is past the erasing phase and is actually a very neat writer for a first grade boy! I like to joke that DS prints better than DH. So maybe they'll grow out of it in a few months?

Edited to say - our school uses Handwriting without tears in 1st grade, and his writing is much improved since the start of the school year.

DD is going in for the first part of her assessment tomorrow. I hope we get some good info!

Fingers crossed for you and DD!

I'm really happy with how well the testing went. DD had a good rapport with both the testers--she had one tester for WISC and another for ach. tests. I don't have scores yet but whatever we get should be a good indicator of her abilities.

I have an appointment for the 20th to talk about the results.

Cathy

Ha, ha, for what it cost us we should have the scores tomorrow! We decided to go with private testing and find out sooner (and with better reliability...)

Cathy

Well, it's official... DD is 2E. But they gave her a diagnosis of "learning disability not specified." I'm not sure how useful that is...

So she definitely has her stengths and weaknesses.... I'm sure the school will say, "Above average in everything...looks great!"

Cathy

I'm sorry, my first response was to laugh at how ridiculous that is. Then I was sad, because it is so true. GS8's school counselor who started the IQ test, then stopped, has been playing phone tag with me. He left a message restating what GS8 said he was told, that IQ testing is done for the kids who are doing poorly in school.
So, you, and all of us, are left to make educational decisions for the children that we had all hoped the trained educators would be able to make. In a world where 'average' is the goal, you can't let the trained educators make the decisions.

Well, at least her teacher this year "gets" DD. That has been so good for DD's self-esteem and has really made her more willing to work on writing. Unfortunately, today is her teacher's last day. She is going on maternity leave and DD will have a long-term sub after spring break. This sub is a retired teacher who taught DD in first grade. I'm afraid that this is not a good teacher-student match. Sigh. I'm hoping things will be better this time around.

Yes, I bet it is the scatter that led to the LD diagnosis.

I haven't gone back to read the beginning of this thread, and I probably confuse everyone on this board, but Cathy, have you already had her evaluated for vision issues (as in, by a behavioral optometrist)? Besides the more obvious clue of dysgraphia, the reason that vision comes to mind is that her scores on the perceptual reasoning are so different from the scores on verbal comp (but then, I wasn't aware until Dottie mentioned it that this might not be unusual among gifted kids?) My dd's scores on the WISC likewise had a lot of scatter, and even though her perceptual reasoning and verbal comp scores were much closer together than that (I think my dd's overall perceptual reasoning score was higher than the overall verbal), the tester had expected her to do better on the block design portion than she did (she kept skewing the designs or something), which they said suggested a vision issue (sure enough, dd has an eye tracking problem and is in vision therapy now - 5 weeks to go, sigh). After all you've been through, a vision eval by the right kind of optometrist should be easy http://www.covd.org/ Or perhaps I merely see vision issues in everyone LOL.

My dd also has similarly lower scores for working memory and processing speed, and is a definite visual-spatial learner. I have found a number of tips on the website to be quite helpful. You probably already have this, but from the website, here is a checklist for diagnosing dysgraphia http://www.visualspatial.org/Articles/chklist.pdf and another article about handwriting http://www.visualspatial.org/Articles/poorhand.pdf

Another article recommends calculating the GAI "if the 4 composite scores vary by 23 or more points, and if the Verbal Comprehension Index and the Perceptual Reasoning Index vary by less than 23 points." http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/About_GDC/whoaregiftd.htm However, I don't quite understand the second part, about varying less than 23 pts between verbal comp and perceptual reasoning.

Now that I have spewed out a bunch of random thoughts that are probably helpful to no one, I better clean up the house while I can.....

I'm glad you got results, and I hope the 2E diagnosis gets your DD what she needs. I have nothing useful to contribute beyond my well-wishes, but I do offer those.