Interesting thoughts bluemagic. We live it a very educated area and it seems every kid has a passion and gift is one area or another. Parents shell out all sorts of money for private instruction so their kids can be competitive. My 13 year old is very passionate about ballet. We do tend to pay a lot for this, but since she is so passionate about it, we feel the expense is justified.
I think it is easy to lose sight of the fact that she is infact 10 years old. She has a lot of things to try and it's an exciting time with low pressure to explore.
As far as ambidextrous. I think I'm not clear on the actual definition. She was not crossing her midline at age 5 and had not chosen a dominant hand. She was right handed by first grade though.
I fixed her pencil grip the summer before first grade and it is beautiful now! The school was not worried but she had a four finger grasp!
She has always been left legged and a lefty when she was in gymnastics...another thing she was very good at, but didn't like the pressure.
She is left-eyed and turns left in dancing.
BUT she is right handed. Maybe this is part of her issues. Might it also have something to do with reversing letters, numbers? This part of her is a mystery to me. She worked sooo incredibly hard to fix this. I can see her pausing before b's and d's still to think.
No wonder her processing is slow. Imagine you had to consider all the directions of a letter each time your wrote it?
I wish I understood this more. I don't know any other children her age who do this. The school is not addressing it. They encourage her to type.
Your stories are very helpful to me.
I go from having so much hope for her and thinking she will outgrow the struggle to feeling like maybe we should just give her the easy classes in school and not worry about it.
But in the end it sounds like it is a balance and she may need support sometimes and teaching her to ask for help and advocate for herself may be the best thing I can do her for her at this point.
