Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional More IEP and dysgraphia q's

DeHe, if there's a serious mismatch between what a child can and will produce orally in response to a question and what they will produce when you ask them to hand write an answer to the same question, then there is almost certainly a disability present that is impairing writing, which could be purely a physical motor issue, such as hypotonia, or it could be a problem that involves other areas as well, such as problems with visual-motor integration, visual processing, phonological processing, dyslexia, or other LDs.

It is really easy for us as parents to attribute poor written output on below-level work as being solely the result of boredom or lack of effort, espeically if that is the reason our children give us, but I would caution you that my son, who is severely dysgraphic, has a diagnosed disorder of written expression, and has hypotonia, attributed his poor written output during the year he spent in school to being bored and not wanting to do assignments, but this attribution was, in hindsight, mostly because it protected his self-esteem: everyone around him could do a much better job at this than he could, and if he refused to try, then he couldn't fail, and he could maintain the fiction that he could do it just as well as everyone else, if only he'd tried. Our kids aren't clueless - they know what good work looks like, and if they can't produce it even when they try, why would they want to chance humiliating themselves in front of their teachers and their classmates, especially on assignments that are intellectually beneath them?

With the options of oral response, a scribe, and a keyboard as well as extended time, his written composition skills are well above grade level (he made a 660 on the writing portion of the SAT in 8th grade), and were that way pretty much immediately upon receiving access to the accomodations. Even with intensive OT and PT, he hasn't gotten to the point where he can write by hand with any degree of fluency and legibility. With what it seems like the OT described, and knowing what I know about how much similar issues inhibited my son's ability to show what he could do (because so much mental effort was going into just trying to control the pencil that very little was left for actually thinking about the answer), I would push for immediate accomodations in the classsroom and on testing in addition to OT - it is likely a fair amount of the resistance that you see to completing assignments will vanish once the chances of the work product being good improve and he realizes this.

Low tone and poor motor coordination could absolutely contribute to your son not liking to play with the other kids at recess - we tend to enjoy things that we are good at, especially where effort and results have some relation to each other. With the kinds of motor deficits that the OT described, it is likely that your son has at least some muscles that are easily fatigued (even if his overall "energy" and fitness is high and he doesn't appear winded, his muscles can still tire out quickly from the low tone) and it is likely that he doesn't really enjoy games where success and enjoyment is primarily based on motor skills, stamina, and coordination, and not on understanding the game or reasoning skillfully within the rules. There isn't anything "wrong" with this, but it is supporting evidence in the report that the deficits that the OT saw during testing are consistent with real-world observations of your child's behavior. It would be unusual for a child with those deficits to be as actively involved in cooperative physical sports and games of physical skill as children without such problems, so this was probably included in the report not to stigmatize your child's choices, but because it lends credence to the idea that what the OT saw was real, and not an artifact of the testing situation.