Dh was having her write down names of states and she seemed fairly fluent while writing. But then I asked her to write the alphabet in all lower case and she only wrote about 38 letters in a minute.
Did your dh time her when she was writing down the names of states?
I also had her copy sentences out of a book and she only wrote about 30 letters per minute. She spelled "appeared" like "appired" even though she was copying.
Copying is a slightly different skill than writing something you know, like the name of the state or the alphabet. I don't know how it's technically supposed to work, but I know that my dysgraphic ds has trouble with copying, and the way he describes the process is he has to look at what he is going to copy, remember as much of it as he can, and then write it down on his paper (or type it on his keyboard), and he complains that he can only remember three words at once so it makes copying really slow (and it is really noticeably slow for him).
Re if the speed of writing states is faster (lpm) than letters, part of that might be that she is thinking about how to form the letters when she writes the alphabet but she knew she was being timed and was less focused on individual letters when she had to write out the whole words for the states.
I guess I'm wondering how far "off" this sounds. I found some norms saying it should be about 50-60 letters per minute on average for copying sentences, so obviously she's lower than that, but how impaired it really is, I don't know.
One way to get an idea of how impaired is to google "letter per minute + 2nd grade" (or whatever other grade you want to compare to. Find the lower grade that matches your dd's lpm range. If it's two grade levels below her grade level, that's considered to be severely impaired.
polarbear
