Actually her writing isn't so bad, just slow.
Hi Dbat, I tend to ramble too and I can just see me rambling all over the place when I have time to reply to your post! Lots of good advice in there, plus a few things I'd add on to and comment on when I have time to comment.
For now, I just wanted to add one thing - my ds did not have very legible printing, but when he learned how to write in cursive it looked extremely neat - his teachers even tried to claim it was the neatest cursive in his class. Like your dd, it was slow - very very slow. DS got so much encouragement from school about his cursive and it made it difficult for us to advocate successfully for him because it was legible. I suspect you already know this, but for any parents of kids with dysgraphia or suspected dysgraphia who might not be aware of it, just because they *can* write doesn't mean the student should be relying on handwriting. Dysgraphia doesn't just mean messy handwriting and slow handwriting, it means that the act of handwriting is using up all of a child's working memory in order to get the writing down on paper, which leaves nothing left over for spelling, punctuation, much less putting thoughts into what ideas the student wants to write about. In addition to all of that, handwriting can be fatiguing - you might not see it while the child is writing, but by the end of the school day when they have to write over and over and over again a child with dysgraphia can be just beyond mentally exhausted as well as physically fatigued. They may also experience wrist or hand pain from trying to hold their hand in a certain way to get the letters formed - this is something that I feel horrible about - we knew that this happened for our ds when he was very young but he went through a year of handwriting OT in 3rd grade and learned how to write without pain - but what I didn't realize was, he was only writing for very short periods of time at that point. We went on to move him to AT and didn't think much about handwriting again, but he still had times in school when he had to handwrite (partly because he just didn't want to mess with scanning his worksheets etc or looking different). He just told me again this spring (in 6th grade) that his hands hurt when he writes.
I'll be back to talk about AT and accommodations. Dbat, finding the AT that will work for a student can be tough - it's been tough for us! For a lot of different reasons. Our ds is much more of a voice-to-text kid because his fine motor issues extend to keyboarding.
More later,
polarbear
