My 11 year old son went through testing and I really have more questions now than I ever did. We went through testing hoping that we could get a diagnosis so he could get OT/PT if he needed it and accommodations for testing if he needed them.
He was diagnosed with motor dyspraxia, but when I look at the symptoms now, few of them seem to fit. I watched videos of my son performing in 17 different songs with his musical theater group, and a lot of them required dancing. His timing was fine. I watched him at rehearsals. The only difference I could see was that his low muscle tone and low endurance caused him to need to rest after two hours when the other kids could keep on going for several more hours. He has to sit and watch sometimes while the other kids keep practicing so he gets about half the practice the other kids get actually doing the dances. He does look a little uncoordinated when he gets to the point that his legs and back start hurting and he just can't keep going, but until then I can no longer see a difference in how fast he learns the dances. The musical theater director can see the difference. One of the moms who is involved with the group told me he is one of the kids that can skip a practice and manage to get it by the time of the performance. She said some kids can't. He learned the song "Bare Necessities" quickly when another actor couldn't do it and practiced it only 3 or 4 times with his partner before the show. He had to remember which way to exit, stage left or stage right, 17 times so he has no left/right confusion. His balance is good now, he isn't out of sync with the other dancers unless he is tired, and he just took a typing test on typingtest.com and typed 38 wpm and he doesn't really touch type. He says he doesn't need to put his hands on the home keys, he can put them anywhere on the keyboard and just use whatever finger is most convenient to type a particular letter. Doesn't that take fine motor coordination? But he definitely still has dysgraphia and at least we got that diagnosis on paper. But I feel that I can't really tell people like the musical theater director that he has motor dyspraxia because if she looks up symptoms on the internet, most of them don't really fit now. His problems now are still the low endurance, low muscle tone, the brace and the migraines. He is good at tongue twisters and using different accents and will sometimes change accents like from a British, Australian, and Irish accents while he is reading out loud for fun.
My son was getting a migraine the day he took the test and I gave him Tylenol which doesn't work very well for his pain. We told the neuropsychologist about it and she said she didn't think it made any difference in the testing. I know that I don't think as well when I have a migraine. When we asked the neuropsychologist why he was able to do certain things that I would think impossible if he had dyspraxia, she said he could have splinter skills. If this is true, I think splinter skills can really make it hard to identify LDs. I wonder if gifted kids have more of these splinter skills than other kids with LDs.
