KJP
This is very familiar sounding, I SO know how you are feeling. Here's my take from my dealing with my DS now 6.5, he is not dyslexic, but has writing issues being remediated with OT.
First, those sound like incredibly boring worksheets. As an adult I don't like doing things that are a waste of my time but do them because of all reasons I'm supposed to. At 5, your DS doesn't have that. He is trying to make very boring more interesting. This has the annoying side affect of making these simple things take longer - this bothers the adult - it's unclear what DS thinks as he is doing it to make it more interesting, presumably it's working to some extent.
My DS in first, drops his pencil, rocks the chair, notices everything in his room he has seen a hundred times, all to avoid doing the work. Just this morning, we have a certain amount left to do before Monday, busy tomorrow, please do this math worksheet now, DS negotiates to just do half, ends up doing the whole worksheet in the 10 minutes I expected it would take if actually sat down and did it rather than the 10 minutes plus whatever drama or distraction because I didn't require him to do all, he skipped the drama and distraction.
We always have agita regarding the writing. Here is what we have learned:
1 - let go the frustration, DH and I would get SO irritated at the delays and have had big yelling bouts with him. Not productive and worse because he has some disability impacting him, even if he didn't, our frustration does not help. So now, and you might have to phase this in as he learns to do this at school, we ask him to work independently. So he does and then we come back and check, rather than sitting there stewing watching him make like the slowest snail on the planet.
2 - working in clumps. We do not do the whole thing in one sitting if can avoid it. Writing assignments we break down to 2-3 sentences at a time. Or we have him dictate, we write it out, and then he copies it, so he doesn't have to remember what he wants to say and concentrate on the letter formation at the same time, which is hard for him.
3 - we stopped caring about coloring, and/or drawing. Most of the time it looked unrecognizable, and well into April of K I think he still just colored big blobs. Now his stuff is more recongizable but he is not an artist and likely won't be. We focused on what mattered to him, it hurt him that he couldn't make things look like they were in his head. So we got him Ed emberly's drawing books which show how to make things step by step - put a box, then a circle - it helped him to understand how you draw
4 - he's getting OT so we try to not be the one teaching him or overly correcting him, instead try to focus on the biggest issue - for DS it's spacing and the impact on legibility. And we ask him to look at it and see what the problem is.
5 - we are more proactive about what he needs - he has a different notebook and paper from his classmates. And it bothers me that he needs the big lines, but he is really progressing, I focus on that, and I try to get him to focus on that
6 - talk to DS as much as necessary about how no one is good at everything, physical things must be practiced to get better. Writing is worth doing. Homework is worth doing.
7 - not stressing about it being perfect, letting the teacher see what he did, warts and all, if he did a crappy job because he wasn't in the mood fine, but he also might have done a crappy job because he can't fit his correctly spelled answer in on the worksheet line because it's too small - teacher needs to see that
It's still stressful - tomorrow is going to suck because I know he doesn't want to write the answer to the question which is totally uninteresting to him. So we will do what is the minimum. That goes against my grain but it makes the point which DS struggles with mightily - you have to do stuff you don't want to do. However, it also acknowledges that this is hard for him, his arm is tired, he knows others do better, so it's ok. We arent letting him off the hook but we aren't penalizing him for having the disability either.
Hope my view from the trenches helps!
DeHe
