Thanks everyone-
Polarbear- my son is 9 and is currently homeschooled after several years of public school. He is a DYS, grade skipped and all over the place academically, from generally around 7th grade level with science and reading/comprehension somewhere in the high school range. We started down the path because his handwriting is dreadful, spacing is a disaster and after one full year of daily handwriting practice, it looks the same as it did before. He is painfully slow at notetaking and after being at an academic summer camp, he was starting to feel like he couldn't keep up physically with the notetaking.
I suspected dysgraphia because his fine motor is really affected- trouble with using a knife, slow to tie shoes, can't cut paper to save his life, any sort of crafting/folding/sewing is very slow and deliberate despite enjoying it. But after an OT and PT eval, it's looking like it's "more" than dysgraphia. He has balance issues, motor control issues and struggles with gross and fine motor.
He's a competitive fencer and does very well at it. He can throw a ball with awesome accuracy and speed but cannot catch a ball thrown from 5 feet away. In his OT eval, she had him try to dribble a ball more than 5 times in a row and he couldn't get past one dribble. He can hop on one foot 5 times, but can't hop on one foot back and forth across a line. He can't jump rope, hula hoop, hit a ball with a racket with any sort of repetition or accuracy, etc. Tag is never good- though he does okay at avoiding the bullying part because he is 99th percentile in height for 9 and looks like a giant.
So for dysgraphia issues at home- he is allowed to type assignments or use voice dictation if he wants. I do have him handwrite some things, but I control the length and the time so it's never more than a paragraph at a time. He doesn't struggle with organizing his thoughts or with spelling, but he will change his structure and "dumb it down" to make it easier to write if he has to print.
We also have no option for adaptive PE and I'm not sure he'd want it anyway. But our PE system grading is not effort based- it is success based. Things like "catch the football three times" for an A, or twice for a B etc.
