Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School Children who hate writing

Anyone heard of poor hand-eye coordination as a root cause of difficulty with handwriting, and know about the implications? We've just had a visit from a friend who taught children of similar age to DS for many years, and had some special interest and training in children's difficulties with reading and writing. She saw him writing and also played ball with him, and commented that we should talk to someone in the school's learning support department about this - she reckons there are some games and exercises that might help him a lot. It wouldn't have occurred to me; both his parents are terrible at ball games so I wouldn't have connected that with the writing thing (in fact writing was also a pain for both of us, although we got good enough eventually, so it is consistent that there might be a connection!)

FWIW he smashed his record for the speed-writing task today, and I'm not really too worried about him - but the learning support people exist and are nice, and if there are things that might help him, I'd certainly like to enlist them.

One of my kids has been exactly the same way. He had to do a book report (due today) and I was concerned that the stress of all that writing would push him over the top. His letters were sloppy and poorly formed and they looked like first-grader had drawn them.

On a whim, I decided to tell him precisely how to write each letter. Examples:

• When you write an l, make sure that it goes STRAIGHT down, like this (write letter correctly). Don't write it at an angle, like this (write letter at angle)."
• "When you write h, make the backbone straight, and make sure that the lower lines are parallel, like THIS. Don't let the lower part of the h drift out to the right like THIS. See the difference?" Etc.

The changes in his attitude and his output were astounding. He started making pretty letters and then got engaged in the whole process. He worked for an hour and a half and was cheery the entire time. He started noticing his own mistakes, and he didn't get upset about them. He said things like, "That's an A+ letter! That's an A+ WORD!!" One of our neighbors (who doesn't know about his writing issues) saw the book report and gushed about how gorgeous it looked. He was beaming.

The most amazing thing about all of this was that he didn't reverse any of his letters --- and he has a history of reversals.

I'm thinking that he's been quite aware of how bad his writing has looked over the last couple of years, and that maybe he's been feeling miserable --- or even ashamed --- of how bad his letters look. Maybe it made him feel stupid. Yet he may also have felt powerless to fix the problem because he just didn't know critical details about precisely how to form the letters. I suspect that the shame over the bad lettering was driving the meltdowns. Who wants to sit around failing again and again and feeling powerless to change the situation?

By second or third grade, it's assumed that you know how to form your letters, so he wasn't getting the help he needed.

Anyway, he's got a long road ahead of him, but I think he's finally on the way to learning how to make nice letters. He'll have to go slowly for a while, but I'm optimistic (for the first time) that he may be able to eventually write nice letters more quickly without stress.

Just a suggestion; hope it helps someone.

OP sounds like a perfectionism issue to me. If he's obsessing over making perfectly-formed letters, that can cause his writing process to be derailed.

My daughter was dealing with a similar issue recently. It wasn't her letter-forming that was the issue, it was her spelling, which isn't up to the level of her reading and verbal skills. So if she had an idea in her head she wanted to put down on paper, she knew by reading it back that it was wrong, but she didn't know how to make it right, and that turned her off from the whole process.

I'm not sure what flipped the switch with her, but suddenly she loves writing.

Ah, thanks for resurrecting the thread, it reminds me that I should update. I don't think perfectionism is in play here, actually. We recently had a meeting with DS7's class teacher and the special needs teacher about this among other things. They confirmed that there's clearly an issue in that DS writes more slowly and, by choice, less than his peers. However, he's apparently doing fine in terms of producing needed output so far this year, and now that the year is underway he's no longer worried about it. Given this and that he's steadily improving, the plan is just to keep an eye on it and be encouraging; they also planned to try giving him a squeezeball which might help him to avoid cramping up his hand muscles. We're also continuing to encourage him to learn to type, and apparently at least for the first set of serious exams he'll face (which are 6 years in the future anyway, so really not to worry yet) it's already fairly easy to get permission for slow writers to type rather than handwrite extended work; it may be that he really is in the first generation that will never need to be able to handwrite for many pages together. (Exams were the only time I ever needed to, and I remember finding it hard!)