What do you think?

[SarahW]

 

What do you think on the handwriting in the above sample (and post below, too big to do both at once)?

 

Age: 9 year 3 months

 

Has received handwriting instruction over the past few years, but the only improvement since kindergarten is in placing space between words and spelling.

 

I know ya'll aren't neuropsychs, but if you were, what would you say?

[SarahW]

Second example.

[prairiewindmomma]

I think it's worth doing some investigating into.  FWIW, his handwriting is about the same as my 14yos who does not have a dysgraphia label, and much, much better than my 10yos with a dysgraphia label.  The mixed cases, dropped letters, and other things I see would certainly have me checking out his functional vision, perception, and motor skills---I'd want the full Beery done.

[Lecka]

I don't think it looks that bad.  My 10-year-old's is worse, too (who is diagnosed with dysgraphia).

 

BUT what it looks like is not the whole story.  Does he take a long time or have to make a lot of effort?  Does his written work seem to be unrepresentative of him?  Does he have hand pain (my son never has, but it is mentioned with other kids). 

 

http://handwriting-solutions.com/dysgraphia.asp

 

This is a website I link...

 

My son's handwriting can be almost that good, sometimes, if he is copying.  It can be that good spelling easier spelling words one at a time. 

 

His goes downhill into illegibility if he is thinking of what to write and writing, it is more challenging than copying from a sample. 

 

So -- I don't know if this is your son's best work or if this took him a long time, etc. 

 

I feel like I would see 3 or 4 boys in a class have handwriting like this, at my son's school, based on seeing their work up for display in the hallways.  I know here it is very, very hard to qualify for OT for handwriting.  My son has been in OT twice (he was in when he was younger, exited, and is back in now).  It is very rare.  Most kids would not qualify.  But for people who can look into private OT, some people do and find it to be helpful.  This is very local for us ----- it is different in different places. 

 

To me ---- if you have a sense like it is frustrating, he is not able to do schoolwork at his level, he gets stressed out, he is not able to read his own handwriting, you wonder how he would ever be able to take notes, etc. anything like this ---- it is concerning. 

 

Anything like that matters more than a writing sample, I think, b/c you can't tell from a writing sample what the situation is. 

 

Edit:  The Beery is something that OTs do (locally).  It has things like: copying a figure (like a triangle inside a square), copying the alphabet, writing the alphabet from memory, and writing letters out-of-order as the teacher names letters.  I have just had the booklet shown to me and gone over with me (sections they think are important for my son) at an IEP meeting, I don't know a lot about it. 

Edited March 7, 2016 by Lecka

[SarahW]

I strongly suspect he's ADHD Inattentive. I got a referral for a psych evaluation, so now we're waiting on that.

 

I'm trying to figure out if his handwriting is something that also needs investigating.

 

He KNOWS how to write the letters. He knows all the rules for capitalization. He knows the differences between uppercase and lowercase. He just...doesn't use it. The other day I pointed out to him that he was putting the capital "D" at the end of words, and letters at the end of words are always lowercase, right? He shrugged "yeah, but the capital is easier." I don't really see how it's easier... He also still writes his "basement" letters above the line, something he has always done, even though he knows they go below the line.

 

We've gone through numerous programs where he copies the individual letters of the alphabet and then writes words. Manuscript, italic, now cursive. He's complaining that he's still doing it, and why is he still doing it? he knows it all already, it's boring, and so on. I'm like, ummm, yeah, it's because your handwriting still isn't good. He generally copies the letters better on the handwriting sheets, but still has some issues with floating and size.

 

He often makes computation errors in math because he misreads the numbers he wrote. He complains if I have him write more than a few sentences in a day. He nearly refused to write the summary I put above because it "would take too long." I didn't time him, but it didn't really take that long. But if I ask him to write much more than that he'll whine and complain that his hand hurts. 

 

It's so disheartening to work so hard on something with him, and still we've gotten about nowhere. There's space between words now. Great. It's really taken us four years to get to that?

 

I'm wondering if maybe there is dysgraphia or something similar, so I should ease up on him. Or maybe I'm too indulgent and should just make him write more. I don't even know anymore...sigh.

 

 

[Lecka]

Have you considered typing? 

 

Typing is reality for some of us, our kids' handwriting is only going to improve so much.

 

If OT is an option, or an OT screening is an option, I think you need to look into it.

 

When kids say their hand hurts ----- that is a problem.  Sometimes there is some underlying weakness (like -- in the shoulder, in the core, whatever) that the OT can strengthen and then it helps with the hand pain. 

 

I am at more of a place of acceptance, that I cannot really make my son have better handwriting.  There is nothing I can do to make it happen.

 

There ARE things I can do that are good to do and can help him to have the best handwriting he can have.

 

Then, there are things I can do to help him have the most positive learning experiences he can have. 

 

They are very worth doing.

 

I think this is worth mentioning, and it is worth mentioning the associated issues. 

[PeterPan]

I'd be much more concerned about his apparent issues with sequencing and why questions than the handwriting.  His sense of humor is terrific.

 

For the psych eval, what kind and how long will they spend?  Doesn't have to be a neuropsych, but they need to do more than achievement and WISC.  You need to have screenings, and maybe for more than just ADHD.  I would want detailed language testing, either by a psych or SLP.  In the ps, they'd typically have an SLP do it.

[kbutton]

I have two kids with handwriting problems. It breaks down in so many places. I think Lecka made a great point about the "how" it goes being as important as what it looks like. My kids were nearly in tears over handwriting and had hand pain. Both had trouble crossing midline and some other things that eventually pointed to visual motor issues. One has more trouble copying than writing from his head. One has more trouble with writing from his head. One has global trouble with motor sequencing. The other does too, but it comes across differently. Both will edit what is in their heads to the bare minimum rather than write it out. If I scribe, they compose better ideas and sentences.

 

A few ideas:

Screen for developmental vision stuff with a COVD optometrist

Letter size--some kids prefer to write large or small. Neither of my children did well long-term on larger lined paper. They prefer to write small. I do insist that capital and lower case letters are proportional--even if you write in all caps, you can have the first letter of a name be written a bit larger. I knew several boys in high school who wrote this way.

Typing is fantastic, but if they have ocular motor issues, they might have trouble with typing too.

 

[SarahW]

I'd be much more concerned about his apparent issues with sequencing and why questions than the handwriting.  His sense of humor is terrific.

 

For the psych eval, what kind and how long will they spend?  Doesn't have to be a neuropsych, but they need to do more than achievement and WISC.  You need to have screenings, and maybe for more than just ADHD.  I would want detailed language testing, either by a psych or SLP.  In the ps, they'd typically have an SLP do it.

 

 

I am concerned with those, but I'm not sure what to do there. The pages are from V&V - I wasn't sure what level to buy and didn't want to spend all my limbs shipping them to England, so I printed off the grade 2 samples on their website. On the one hand, he says it's babyish, and amuses himself by coming up with crazy answers. But on the other hand - he's missing things. Like in the story of the guy who got caught in a blizzard and finds a cave and crawls into it, he totally missed that if the guy had to crawl into it it must be small, and imagined that the cave was large. "No, read what is in the story and imagine that, imagine a guy crawling, he must be crawling for a reason" I said. He read the passage again and said "Huh, I didn't see that."

 

In what I posted above, he obviously sees the right answer to the first question - The hunter carved the ducks out of wood because wood floats, metal sinks, but doesn't express that very well, and is clearly trying to use the fewest words possible. But if you put a "t" in sinks it turns into stinks, haha. He's clearly 9. So then I'm left wondering, is he fudging around because it's too easy? But is it a good idea to move on to something harder if he is struggling with the easy? So then I feel stuck and frustrated. 

 

I'm not exactly sure what is going to happen for evaluation. In England the GP refers you, and then they send a letter with an appointment. I'm still waiting for that letter. Hopefully it will come soon and tell me something useful.

[PeterPan]

Well when you say someone is struggling with inferences, wh-questions, and sequencing, I would be asking about diagnoses beyond ADHD.  Have you had any other indications of anything?  

 

I don't think the task was a problem or that you chose ill.  I think you're seeing that he has weaknesses.  I say sequencing, because his retelling is weak and doesn't reflect the sequence of the story.  There's a lot of overlap between ADHD and ASD.  You want a thorough eval that can look at all those things.  Pragmatics testing and detailed language testing (the CELF, for instance) can be helpful. Hopefully the evals will give you information to target better.  I would put your energy into getting thorough evals and not assume this is your teaching or that you've been doing something incorrectly.

[SarahW]

I was going to write more last night, but DH came home from work and was whining about dinner.

 

I've tried to have him do typing. I picked up a Spongebob Squarepants typing program and got him started on it. He thought it was fun until he realized that he was expected to use certain fingers on certain keys. Looking at the screen, looking at the keyboard, then looking at his fingers to put the right finger on the right key took him a long time. I told him that it would come with practice, but he found it very frustrating. He eventually "rebelled" and typed with whatever fingers he wanted, but it didn't go much faster, and then there wasn't much point to doing a typing program, now was there? So I put away, thinking that I'll take it back out in a few months.

 

I talked to DH a bit about CP's handwriting and reading comprehension problems. DH said he also struggled to write legibly when he was CP's age, and has always had issues following narratives. And completing reading comprehension tests were enormously difficult. Now, this is a guy who has read Marx and Freud and understood them and can talk about their main points and arguments quite well, but had enormous issues reading a book such as Prince Caspian. As he put it, he doesn't remember what happened in the story previously. If he puts the book down for a day or more he won't remember what has happened in the story at all, and needs to go back to the beginning to read the book again. With nonfiction though, if he puts a book down for a little while he can just go back a page or so, pick up the argument again, and then continue.

 

The also have problems following written directions - I left DH to the homeschooling one day last week and he and CP couldn't make head or tails of the (simple and straightforward) directions for a page of Building Thinking Skills. They also have difficulty keeping characters and events in a story straight - when CP read The Last Battle he got completely confused on the incident of Tirian and Jewel killing the unarmed Calormen, he had no idea who killed who or why. DH also said that those sort of things confuse him, and he would need a spend a lot of time rereading and sorting out the events to understand what was going on.

 

Trouble making inferences, yes. It frustrates me because, on the one hand, CP and DH are really good at understanding complicated abstract things (they discuss quantum mechanics for fun) but can't jump from A to C. huh? He's normally good at math, and we were flying through BA3D, but now we got to the estimation chapter and he's stuck. The knows how to estimate, but the questions that ask him if he rounds down both numbers in a equation if the estimate will be over or under confuse him. He calculates out the equation and the estimate, which isn't what he's supposed to do and takes a long time. And sometimes there isn't enough information to do all the calculations (since you're not supposed to calculate it) and then he gets mad.

 

How do you teach someone to inference??? My DH is freaked out that CP will end up like him, underachieving and frustrated that he can't accomplish the things he wants to do. DH was just diagnosed ADHD last year though. 

 

There are also some sensory and emotional issues going on with CP. I brought them up with the GP when he gave the referral, so hopefully that message got passed along.

 

I just feel stuck right now, waiting for the evaluation, and not getting anywhere with anything (it seems). Right now he prefers to watch cartoons with Babypants, simple things like Peppa Pig. I suppose because the narrative is simple enough for him to follow easily? But he's obviously plenty smart, so it exasperates me that he's stuck there.

[PeterPan]

Has he had an OT eval?  And an eval by a developmental optometrist?  Sounds like he needs both.

 

For the typing, I switched my dd to Dvorak (so she couldn't hunt and peck!) and PAID her royally for progress.  

[Heathermomster]

When DS was younger, he drew picture notes alongside the paragraphs and sentences as he read and then he would narrate back the story while looking at the notes.  The picture notes looked like sticks and weirdness; however, he remembered story details.

 

Teaching typing is tough.  DS learned when he was 11 yo, and we were very deliberate with the lessons.  I purchased an ergonomic keyboard that he liked.  I set up the workstation's chair, keyboard, and monitor height to suit him.  He could not see his hands, and I explained that fact early on.  The WPM was set very low, and he practiced for 10 minutes, took a short break, and came back for 10 more minutes.  I tried to make things low stress on my end, but I did not allow rewards if he complained.  DS thanked me for about two years once he learned to type, and I never saw that coming.  

 

My DD has recently started using either my Android phone or her IPod to dictate narrations to me.  We review the narrations together, edit, and then print.

 

 

Edited March 8, 2016 by Heathermomster