Several (many?) of us have children who have big trouble producing output that anything like matches their intellectual ability; this is a thread for us to avoid derailing another.

Here's where my DS is and what we're currently doing. Suggestions appreciated!

DS is 7, untested but very advanced in reading (has been able to read anything for some years) and maths. He's with age peers in a private school which has been great with him so far. He's just about to leave the cosy younger-kids part of the school to where he'll have specialist teachers for different subjects and be expected to organise himself much more. He's anxious about that and the thing he's most anxious about is his ability to write enough and fast enough.

That particular worry isn't silly, but I see his anxiety as much more important than his actual weakness in writing. He has neat joined-up writing, which is just a little slow and painstaking. When he writes by hand he has a tendency to get lost and forget what he was trying to write. Sometimes he "gives up", stares into space instead, and ends up not finishing what he's writing. I tend to think of his writing as "age appropriate on a good day" which I think is fair for handwriting. Within school I think he is not quite meeting their (high) expectations; he's always had "targets" along the lines of "write faster". His spelling, grammar, vocabulary etc. are all more than fine.

He is learning to type, but finds this similarly frustrating to handwriting. I don't think typing is going to be a good general substitute for handwriting any time soon.

My reaction to his being anxious has been to institute a daily practice regime with the aim of getting him to feel happier about writing by the time school starts next week (more with the idea "get back in practice" than for improving as such). Interestingly he's been pretty happy with this. [ETA what I mean is: even though he's anxious about writing and dislikes doing it, he does see practice as the way to get past the problem. I am hugely encouraged by this.] What he does:

- warms up by writing over an alphabet sheet

- practice for thinking of what to say: dictates at least 5 sentences on a given topic to a typing parent. He gets one minute to think about the topic, and then has to dictate fast enough that the parent doesn't have to stop typing.

- practice for physically writing: copies out a list of words, the same ones every day (it's actually a list of kings and queens, killing two birds with one stone!) and is timed with a stopwatch. It takes him about 20 mins; I would hope he can get that down, but even if not, at least he's doing a few minutes of writing every day. At the end we write his time and the date on the paper (and I read him a few pages of a good history book on the monarch of his choice).

Couple of things which really worked with my DS6

1. Copy some text word to word on paper from any book.

2. We invented a game, we put a timer for 1 min, then we take turns to suggest a topic, e.g. colors, then we both start writing as many colors we can in a min. In the end whoever gets more names on the paper gets a point and we continue. When we started with the game my son was able to get 2-4 words and now he is anywhere between 8 to 10 words :-). He enjoys going wild with the topics too.

Absolutely nothing is working with DD9 right now. Suggesting that she write anything send her into a major meltdown of epic proportions. She tried to get her two-year old brother to sign her name to a birthday card(claiming it would be 'cuter' if he scribbled it than her).

We do have worries about her spelling, grammar, etc. her work looks like that of a child at least 2-3 years younger. Her written output is about 10 years behind her cognitive abilities.. and to me that is something to be worried about. How much can we blame on her ADHD?

Reassessment next week with the pysch to investigate for stealth dyslexia. I'm at my wits end. I don't know what to do to help or encourage her anymore. Her and I have reached a stalemate. There is nothing I can offer that will entice her to write anymore. I am dreading the start of school next week.

DS8 struggles with writing as well at school. Its not that he can't...its that he has formed some kind of block knowing hes not " the best " at it and figures if he avoids it as much as possible, he won't have to deal with it...He says he has all kinds of ideas, but figuring out how to start it out is where his sticking point is, plus he hates writing by hand. I've been trying to have him set a goal of writing about topics with a matrix I've created for him so he knows what is supposed to go where so he can try and map it out visually ( hes a visual spacial learner ) and once he comes up with a final product that meets all thats written in the matrix he gets to chose something fun to do activity wise. My hope is the more comfortable he gets with seeing that he can do it, the less resistance he will put up at school when it comes to writing.

That word game shitu sounds great I may try that with him to work on starter word prompting that is done quickly! (Hes very competitive so anything he can try and beat me at, should do the trick! )

My DD9 has major blocks stemming from spelling, handwriting, and what I discovered a few days ago: a horridly painful pencil grip. We're addressing them by doing our own spelling at home - the method the school uses is ill suited to her. Starting last week, I integrated using a pencil grip that forces the tripod grip, and we pick two common letters from the list and focus on the formation of just those two letters. We have a timer set for 8 minutes, and the whole shebang is done in just 8 minutes a day. We're about two weeks into the spelling, and a week into the handwriting and pencil grip part of it. At a very minimum, she's more engaged in each of the three activities than she's ever been before. I think it's a factor of knowing it will be over soon, as well as having learned through other experiences over the summer that she really can make a ton of progress in just a few minutes a day.

At 7, your DS still is very young. Could there be some old fashioned asynchrony going on? Has he displayed proficiency with other fine motor skills? Maybe the school would let him give oral responses or accept parental scribing to reduce some of his writing load as you work on his written output. I would hope that the school would be willing to work with you. Telling a child to write faster when there may be a physical or mental challenge will only make him write slower. They unwittingly may be contributing to his anxiety. I would try to get the school involved in working through a solution.

As for our situation, my DD9 has a dyslexia/dysgraphia diagnosis. Her oral responses are so much more complex than her written ones that I know there is a lot more in that head than what shows in writing. I suspect that anxiety and perfectionism play a huge role in her lack of output. She is so worried about spelling something wrong or not forming her letters correctly that she literally freezes up. We've tried scribing and then letting her copy. We've tried telling her to write without regard to spelling or punctuation. It hasn't worked.

For us, we are working with the school to get her keyboarding this year. We worked with an OT this summer. They suspect she may have some unidentified executive function issues. I read the book Late Lost and Unprepared based on their recommendation. They did have a small section on dysgraphia but most of it was about ADD and didn't really fit our situation. We had a meeting to discuss incorporating more keyboarding into her classroom routine. We are hoping that separating the physical act of writing from the content of her writing will improve her output. Right now we are in wait and see mode.

Sometimes kids "draw" their letters instead of "writing" them-- using, in effect, their art skills to compensate for a language-and-motor deficit. My DS's cursive is gorgeous, but sometimes derails his actual thinking-and-writing process if the writing job is itself difficult. Kids who do this tend to wear themselves out on writing tasks, so as they advance in school it becomes more of a problem.


I would be encouraged by that too. And, Colinsmum, the tasks you designed are basically the same things we did with our DS starting in kindergarten (he had a poor pencil grip and was generally very uncomfortable writing). Over time the speed-writing task really does improve fluency. We change out the texts he copies when he gets more than 85 characters per minute finished, so he doesn't get attached to any one text.

School gave DS "advance organizers" (worksheets with places to put topic sentence and the supporting sentences) but he was so aggravated at having to write them twice that he quickly learned to keep an organized hierarchy of ideas in his head.

I'm watching this closely in my own DS9; we see this as a mostly remediated issue for him, but it rears its head from time to time...

DeeDee

Asynchrony certainly. His fine motor skills used to be poor compared with many agemates, and I think this got him off on the wrong foot with writing (if I'd been home eding him, I would not have been pushing writing at the point when he started school). Now, though, I think his fine motor skills are fine; I can't think of a task other than writing/colouring than he seems to have more trouble with than others do.

(Incidentally, watching him practise a loud piano piece with fast quavers he other day, I wondered whether and how much his piano practice has contributed to his improvement in writing. Certainly in some sense his fingers are much stronger now than they were; I'm not sure whether it's a relevant sense.)

The school (bless it) has no written homework, so there's no occasion for parental scribing: all the writing he does for school is done in the classroom. I don't honestly think he needs accommodation as such. They do plenty of talking etc., so it's not as though he doesn't have the chance to explore topics orally, and they're well aware of the gap between what he can say and what he writes.

Hard to explain. It isn't exactly that he's anxious while writing - he rather tends to drift off! He's anxious now about the higher expectations he expects to meet, but it doesn't seem to have been a source of great anxiety during school terms. I think his teachers so far have been doing a good job of encouraging and redirecting him, and certainly his output has been increasing steadily. (They choose their own targets - so "write faster" is his crude instruction rather than theirs!) I certainly will step in if there does seem to be a problem once school starts (next week) but I rather expect that they'll handle it fine. It seemed more productive to take a "what can we do about this, then?" rather than a "there there never mind" attitude at home when the issue came up, that's all.

Good luck with you DD; it sounds as though you have a plan, I hope it works.

(Weird, for some reason quoting is not working for me: I'm getting an error message about only being able to quote blank levels deep... I'll italicise instead.)
Quoting DeeDee:

Sometimes kids "draw" their letters instead of "writing" them-- using, in effect, their art skills to compensate for a language-and-motor deficit.

I'd heard of that, but I don't think it's what DS is doing. (He does not *have* any art skills to speak of - art is by a long way his weakest area.)


We change out the texts he copies when he gets more than 85 characters per minute finished, so he doesn't get attached to any one text.

85 characters/min sounds like quite a lot to me - I must count and see what DS is doing now. Any particular reason for picking that figure?

It's what the behavior therapist who helped us break his fisted pencil grip habit recommended; I never asked why that particular figure. But it's one he can usually hit after practicing a text about 10 times.

DeeDee

Anyone heard of poor hand-eye coordination as a root cause of difficulty with handwriting, and know about the implications? We've just had a visit from a friend who taught children of similar age to DS for many years, and had some special interest and training in children's difficulties with reading and writing. She saw him writing and also played ball with him, and commented that we should talk to someone in the school's learning support department about this - she reckons there are some games and exercises that might help him a lot. It wouldn't have occurred to me; both his parents are terrible at ball games so I wouldn't have connected that with the writing thing (in fact writing was also a pain for both of us, although we got good enough eventually, so it is consistent that there might be a connection!)

FWIW he smashed his record for the speed-writing task today, and I'm not really too worried about him - but the learning support people exist and are nice, and if there are things that might help him, I'd certainly like to enlist them.

One of my kids has been exactly the same way. He had to do a book report (due today) and I was concerned that the stress of all that writing would push him over the top. His letters were sloppy and poorly formed and they looked like first-grader had drawn them.

On a whim, I decided to tell him precisely how to write each letter. Examples:

• When you write an l, make sure that it goes STRAIGHT down, like this (write letter correctly). Don't write it at an angle, like this (write letter at angle)."
• "When you write h, make the backbone straight, and make sure that the lower lines are parallel, like THIS. Don't let the lower part of the h drift out to the right like THIS. See the difference?" Etc.

The changes in his attitude and his output were astounding. He started making pretty letters and then got engaged in the whole process. He worked for an hour and a half and was cheery the entire time. He started noticing his own mistakes, and he didn't get upset about them. He said things like, "That's an A+ letter! That's an A+ WORD!!" One of our neighbors (who doesn't know about his writing issues) saw the book report and gushed about how gorgeous it looked. He was beaming.

The most amazing thing about all of this was that he didn't reverse any of his letters --- and he has a history of reversals.

I'm thinking that he's been quite aware of how bad his writing has looked over the last couple of years, and that maybe he's been feeling miserable --- or even ashamed --- of how bad his letters look. Maybe it made him feel stupid. Yet he may also have felt powerless to fix the problem because he just didn't know critical details about precisely how to form the letters. I suspect that the shame over the bad lettering was driving the meltdowns. Who wants to sit around failing again and again and feeling powerless to change the situation?

By second or third grade, it's assumed that you know how to form your letters, so he wasn't getting the help he needed.

Anyway, he's got a long road ahead of him, but I think he's finally on the way to learning how to make nice letters. He'll have to go slowly for a while, but I'm optimistic (for the first time) that he may be able to eventually write nice letters more quickly without stress.

Just a suggestion; hope it helps someone.

OP sounds like a perfectionism issue to me. If he's obsessing over making perfectly-formed letters, that can cause his writing process to be derailed.

My daughter was dealing with a similar issue recently. It wasn't her letter-forming that was the issue, it was her spelling, which isn't up to the level of her reading and verbal skills. So if she had an idea in her head she wanted to put down on paper, she knew by reading it back that it was wrong, but she didn't know how to make it right, and that turned her off from the whole process.

I'm not sure what flipped the switch with her, but suddenly she loves writing.

Ah, thanks for resurrecting the thread, it reminds me that I should update. I don't think perfectionism is in play here, actually. We recently had a meeting with DS7's class teacher and the special needs teacher about this among other things. They confirmed that there's clearly an issue in that DS writes more slowly and, by choice, less than his peers. However, he's apparently doing fine in terms of producing needed output so far this year, and now that the year is underway he's no longer worried about it. Given this and that he's steadily improving, the plan is just to keep an eye on it and be encouraging; they also planned to try giving him a squeezeball which might help him to avoid cramping up his hand muscles. We're also continuing to encourage him to learn to type, and apparently at least for the first set of serious exams he'll face (which are 6 years in the future anyway, so really not to worry yet) it's already fairly easy to get permission for slow writers to type rather than handwrite extended work; it may be that he really is in the first generation that will never need to be able to handwrite for many pages together. (Exams were the only time I ever needed to, and I remember finding it hard!)