I just typed this up and it disappeared, so hopefully this isn't a double post.

DS9 has dysgraphia and stealth dyslexia. We started working with an OG tutor in September and he started learning cursive. They say that cursive is easier for kids with dyslexia because the letters start at the same place on the line every time. Well, I'm linking to a picture of his first 5 sentences written spontaneously (without a model to look at). I wish I had a before picture to show you what his printing looks like, but if you have a kid with dysgraphia, you know how bad it is. His cursive has looked this good almost from the beginning. It is truly amazing. BTW, he hasn't learned capital letters yet, hence the lower case i's.

WOW!!! DD9's cursive is better than her printing, but not by that much. Teaching her cursive was the trial of all trials. It was what started our journey to the dyslexia/dysgraphia diagnosis. Her psychologist at first thought it was related to anxiety and perfectionism (not saying they are not, but that did not explain her problems away).

Progress is an amazing thing! Keep that picture and take many, many more. I took a picture when DD wrote four three-letter words in cursive on the bathtub tiles with bath crayons. It was the first time she had ever wrote in cursive without a cattle prod. We framed it!

Wow my DD10 struggles greatly with cursive. Complains she can barely read it which is starting to cause problems in school since her teachers are starting to write mostly in cursive on the SmartBoards.

That's really awesome cursive!!! I totally get how wonderful it is to see too!

Our dysgraphic ds also has found cursive to be "easier" and his cursive is much more legible than his print - so legible in fact that it was one of the best-looking cursive scripts in his 4th grade class when the kids first learned cursive. It actually made things *more* difficult for him in school for awhile - and for me. His teachers saw that he could write in cursive, and they tried to use that to argue that he wasn't dysgraphic "anymore" and didn't need his keyboarding and other software accommodations. The thing is, no matter how great his cursive looked on paper, his speed is so extremely slow that it will never be functional for him, and he is still bogged down by the act of handwriting filling up his working memory which means in turn the content of what he writes is very limited compared to other means of expression. The other thing that happened with our ds is that as great as his cursive looked in 4th grade, it didn't improve and several years later still looks the same, while at the same time his classmates' cursive (and printing) continues to look better and better. So ds' cursive looked "normal" in 4th grade but no longer looks "normal" for his grade level.

Best wishes,

polarbear

If it matters,I am an adult with dyslexia who always found cursive even harder, despite all the assurances that there was "scientific proof" that I had to find it easier than print-writing.
There is research showing that the fastest, most legible handwriters avoid cursive but don't quite print, either: they skip the harder joins (so they're joining only some of the letters) and they tend to use print-like shapes for those letters whose cursive and printed shapes disagree. This is how most adults write, if they are rapid and legible at all -- so why not work toward that? There is some more info at a site called HandwritingThatWorks dot com.

Hmmm... interesting. The other day at dd6 IEP meeting I brought up that cursive is supposed to be better for some kids. The OT and teachers basically said "yes, for some" but then dropped it. You have me wondering if it's something I should pursue...

For kids with dysgraphia, may I suggest the use of a gel pen? They seem to offer less friction than a pencil. My son and many of the students I tutor all seem to really enjoy writing with a gel pen. It's hard to find, but there;s even an erasable one (Pilot Frixion) which seems to oversome many teachers' resistance to the use of a pen in early grades.

http://www.amazon.com/Pilot-FriXion-Point-Erasable-FX7-BLK/dp/B001GAOTLY

Yes, DS9 is extremely slow, too. It definitely is not something he is able to use for school work yet. I'm glad you replied because I was just expecting to see continued speed and improvement. Now I know not to expect too much, which is good, because sometimes my high expectations lead to a lot of frustration.

This is definitely the way I write...a mix of cursive and print...and I write very fast. I have explained to him, as has his teacher, that as time goes by, he will adjust his letter to write the way that suits him best.

HoneyBadger - we used gel pens for our kid with dysgraphia as well as pencils with insertable lead - and put fat, spongy grippers on both. It really helped when he was younger. Great advice!

perplexed - that's awesome writing! Cursive was not the magic bullet for our son, but I'd heard that it could be. Your sample is proof of that!

My son's mid school teachers have all banded together and decided that my son will have access to their classroom computers rather than doing his work on paper. His keyboarding skills are quite good, so he's much faster and accurate when typing.

Hi, I have worked with children and adults with dyslexia, dysgraphia etc., for over 25 years and I think it is time that we stopped concentrating so much on hand-writing. Before teachers all email me, I am not saying 'throw it out', I am simply saying if a student has such awful problems handwriting, then we should look at something else, Voice Recognition Software is brilliant and should be considered seriously by students of all ages. In the UK now, we have an 'Equality Act', which generally would mean if a student needed to use software then they should do so. We don't question whether a student, who is physically disabled, needs certain equipment and its time we stopped asking students' with learning difficulties.

I stopped concentrating so much on my son's handwriting when I saw that it really held him back from getting his thoughts on paper. He did try cursive but he chose to go back to printing. He only uses cursive now for signing his name. His spelling, grammar, vocabulary and ability to organize his thoughts are really good when he is allowed to type. He can write legibly, but his hands tire quickly and when that happens his handwriting isn't as legible.

Teachers in our small town public school use difficulty with coloring in the lines and sloppy handwriting as an excuse to hold kindergartners back a year which is one reason we had to homeschool. My son was reading at a 5th grade level and doing mental math in kindergarten but the teacher wanted to hold him back because of a fine motor disability without any occupational therapy. Smart kids with disabilities do not receive an appropriate education at this school.

To me, not allowing accommodations for kids with dysgraphia seems almost as bad as telling people who have disabilities who can walk short distances that they can't use their scooters in the Walmart or anywhere else until they have walked to the point where they are going to fall down on their face and then and only then are they are allowed to use the equipment that makes their disabilities more manageable. By forcing them to walk as far as they can they might be able to walk a few more steps the next time before falling over. It just makes more sense to me to use accommodations and spend the energy that would be used on dealing with the disability to learn or do something more productive instead of, in my son's case, working on handwriting so that he can double the amount he can write without pain to ten minutes instead of five. In my opinion my son is better off working on his abilities and not the disabilities. There are a lot of people who will not agree with me, but my husband and I have done a lot of thinking about this. My husband is a supervisor and has had some very bright employees with disabilities that affected handwriting. He only cared about the excellent job these people did, not their inability to color in the lines well or write legibly for long periods of time.

My son found that he can type very quickly on his iPhone or iPod that he keeps in his pocket to take notes but he can write brief notes with pencil and paper if he has to and type or write out the rest later. Dysgraphia just doesn't seem like it will be that much of a disability for my son as an adult if he is allowed to use technology.

I don't think there is a simple answer that will apply as the underlying reasons for dysgraphia vary as does the severity of the condition. While of course we wouldn't want to tell people not to use the scooter at Walmart, at the same time it would be a gigantic mistake for people to lose the mobility they do have just because scooters exist. Especially for younger kids, they really need a very good assessment of dysgraphia and a customized plan.

Every kid deserves to get an appropriate education and to have plenty of time to develop their own talents. Fortunately, for most kids there is time to also work on areas where they struggle. For our child it would have been a huge mistake to decide to quit on motor skills, handwriting, strengthening, etc. With steady work over many years, he made a huge amount of progress and ultimately that has made it so life is a bit easier and there is less standing in the way of developing talent. It is time well spent.

I do feel that handwriting is very important. No, we don't need handwriting for the majority of things we do any more, but it's the little things...jotting down a phone message or a quick reminder note, writing a message on a birthday card.

I do think our children should be encouraged to use accomadations such as keyboarding, but I don't think handwriting instruction should be abandoned. With that said, there are many levels of dysgraphia...so if a child is profoundly dysgraphic, it may be appropriate to abandon handwriting instruction.

My issue with accomadations has been that my son refuses to use them. He doesn't want to stand out from the rest of the class. He would rather turn in sloppy, illegible work that try to keyboard.

I agree with passthepotatos. DS has been in weekly OT for 15 months, with daily fine motor exercises and regular handwriting homework. It is just in the last several weeks that he has begun printing in a legible form.

For our family, it's not an "either-or". During a meeting with a math teacher recently who had decided that she could "fix" my son's dysgraphia by refusing him an accommodation of using a calculator for the rote calculations of problems, the head of the special ed department made a comment about us that helped explain our philosophy. "They've always chosen to require their son to do things the hard way - until the hard way got in the way of doing it at all or doing it successfully. He's hit that point, so it's time to listen."

When my son was in third grade, he would come home and sit in our kitchen from the time he finished his snack until supper, because it took him that long to write out his homework. There were days I wanted to rescue him, but my husband reminded me I'd be cheating him out of the success of master something that was difficult. By letting him work through it, he finally got to the point that the work took him a couple of hours instead of all night (although it took his classmates maybe a half hour).

We push our son very hard to find solutions where there are barriers and to master tasks that seem impossible, because we want him to have every tool possible for success. But when the barrier is so great that it comes in the way of making progress or getting behind on a concept, that's where we draw the line. So when it's a research paper, he dictates or types. When it's a one-page essay, he writes it longhand.

It doesn't have to be and really shouldn't be either-or.

Dysgraphia caused my son more trouble with math than with writing because he couldn't type his math. He always picked up concepts quickly and became better and faster at mental math than I ever was as a way to compensate for his handwriting issues. When he kept saying he hated math I realized that I had to do something different. We went back to taking turns writing out the problems in his Life of Fred Algebra book. We used to do that when he was younger. When it is my turn to do the writing he tells me exactly what to write. He uses IXL for more practice to increase his speed in doing the problems. When he does it his way he is faster and usually makes fewer mistakes than I do and I don't have dysgraphia. I think the sense of mastery he feels when he beats me at math is better than the sense of mastery that he gets by doing more handwriting. He cuts out as much of the handwriting as he can and still gets the correct answer. IXL deducts points if you get a wrong answer and you have to answer several more correctly to get to the point where you were before the mistake so he has an incentive to not make mistakes. He uses a whiteboard and erases (much easier on a whiteboard) what needs to be changed instead of rewriting each line of the algebra problem. He seems to be able to do some of the IXL problems mentally without writing them down. By letting him write out only what he needs to so that he can get the correct answer might help him in timed test situations so I let him do this some of the time. Other times I have him write everything out and tell him that this is how he would have to do it if he were in school so that he can do it that way also if he has to.

I did not have my son spend hours doing work that involved handwriting because he needed time to work on piano and musical theater and dance and exercise that I knew would further develop his coordination and strength, and it has. I also wanted to allow him plenty of time to read and learn things that were of interest to him to further develop his excellent vocabulary and his ability to carry on intelligent conversations about many different things. I wanted to allow him time to look for answers to his many questions and to discuss those questions with me and his dad who is just as much of a geek as his son but hides it in public just as my son has to do.

I wanted my son to have plenty of time to keep up with what was going on in the news and to learn about the history and culture of lots of different countries and to know that there is an interesting world outside of our small town where he doesn't fit in because he is interested in everything except sports and it seems that most of the other kids we meet are the opposite.

Because I didn't make him practice writing for hours he had time to read about things like Jungian psychology and he is able to make jokes when he is studying science. Yesterday we read on Brainpop "Some researchers, including Leeuwenhoek, claimed they could see tiny "animacules" when they observed reproductive cells... My son who immediately noticed the anima in animacules joked, "could they see their "inner female?" He says things like this all the time and I enjoy learning with him and just talking to him. If I make him practice writing more than what he is doing we lose the fun in learning and neither one of us is willing to give that up.

We absolutely need to keep as much fun in our lives as possible because my son will have to go back to a full time brace for at least a few more years until he stops growing and it is going to be difficult but we will get through it together.

I guess I always saw practicing handwriting for hours as taking away time from learning more important things. My son does still get some writing practice and my husband, who watched a Jack Vale video with my son that advertised a gadget called a "pooter" that well, makes fart noises, thought it might be a more fun way for our middle school age boy to do hand strengthening exercises than just squeezing a boring old ball. My son is definitely using it more than he did the ball.

I take it my comment about having a third-grader work on his homework for hours struck a nerve.

Just to clarify, my son creates his own music on his keyboard, just earned a spot on the local climbing team, creates stop-action videos with his Legos, plays with the neighborhood kids, and has plenty of free time to veg.

That does not in any way change the fact that I expect my son to try twice as hard to master things that come naturally for other kids and that accommodations should be a part of the mix when it slows down learning but should not negate the effort to master the skills that are holding him back.

I appreciate your difference of opinion but do take exception to what I see as a clear dig on my parenting decisions.

I respect your opinions and wish you the very best with your strategies and philosophies, and I do believe there is room for mine here as well.

That's exactly how i write! You say that writing like that would work better for Dysgraphics, but how could you improve the quality of handwriting like that?