Name this problem....

[prairiewindmomma]

I need to describe a particular problem to the neuro-OT person, and I need some help figuring this out.

 

Ds reads and comprehends well. If you test his vocabulary in isolation, it is vast. He can give synonyms easily.  His ability to write is limited by his dysgraphia, but I am discovering that he is having a harder even with sentence formation. We are working through Diana Hanbury King's Writing Skills Book A.  Today he was given an exercise in which a sentence was given. He needed to follow that with a sentence of his own creation.  He shut down, and told me that he could not think of any words.  I believe him.  He does have slow processing speed, so we waited a bit, and still he had a hard time generating ideas.

 

Is this just processing speed or is this something more?

 

Can someone point me down a research path, please?

[hornblower]

Does he have this problem with speaking too? So if you were doing an exercise where you read a sentence, would he be able to follow with a sentence? 

 

[prairiewindmomma]

He can generate content when we do everything orally and he is not expected to write anything.  We just played a back and forth story game. A lot of his following sentences were incorrect grammatically (they began with "because"), but there were rich ideas behind his thoughts.  He sped up as we went along, which is true of his processing skills in other areas of his life.

 

As far as other writing skills go,  he has always been able to narrate fairly well.  He struggles a bit with IEW materials, as they require rephrasing, but it's not as difficult as generating new content.  It may just be the combination of it all, but I'd like to pin that down more precisely.

 

[Crimson Wife]

The Killgallon Sentence Composing for Elementary would be good to work on this skill.

[hornblower]

I think you're looking at disorder of written expression then. 

My 2e has this dx. In our case, some of the gifted scores were in verbal expression. Given your reports of your child's vocabulary, I'd strongly suspect you're looking at a similar profile.

I agree with Killgallon. We used that a fair bit here... 

How is his spelling? We have horrible spellers here, despite years of remediation. For them, part of the freezing is "Ok, I can't write that because I can't even begin to spell it."

Dictating software, and just typing stuff and relying on spellcheck helped this a fair bit. 

 

[prairiewindmomma]

He spells orally above grade level.

 

[Noreen Claire]

This sounds like my oldest, who was diagnosed with 'nonverbal learning disorder' (that was 6-8yrs ago, so may be a different term now). Basically, he could do whatever he wanted *out loud*, but, if you stuck a pencil in his hand and told him to write it out, POOF...it was gone. Just not possible. His teachers tested him orally whenever possible.

 

[Heathermomster]

I need to describe a particular problem to the neuro-OT person, and I need some help figuring this out.

 

Ds reads and comprehends well. If you test his vocabulary in isolation, it is vast. He can give synonyms easily.  His ability to write is limited by his dysgraphia, but I am discovering that he is having a harder even with sentence formation. We are working through Diana Hanbury King's Writing Skills Book A.  Today he was given an exercise in which a sentence was given. He needed to follow that with a sentence of his own creation.  He shut down, and told me that he could not think of any words.  I believe him.  He does have slow processing speed, so we waited a bit, and still he had a hard time generating ideas.

 

Is this just processing speed or is this something more?

 

Can someone point me down a research path, please?

I think the issue is word retrieval, and word retrieval is a common problem with dysgraphics. 

 

I am not sure that I understand the assignment.  Was he supposed to create a similar sentence based upon one already written?

 

Maybe the program that you are using is not explicit enough?  Can your boy parse a sentence, and does he know parts of speech?  Since he is great with synonyms, maybe brainstorm alternate nouns, phrases, adjectives, and adverbs, and then have him restate the sentence using the brainstormed words.

Edited April 28, 2016 by Heathermomster

[FairProspects]

We have this issue too. I'm not exactly sure what to call it because word retrieval in isolation is rapid. It is a difficulty putting complex thoughts into the correct words and organization structure when writing.

Edited April 28, 2016 by FairProspects

[PeterPan]

You could look in your evals and see if they ever did language testing like the CELF or CASL.  You want to know if there's a receptive/expressive language issue or if it's only the difficulty of getting to written (dysgraphia).  From what you said, you wouldn't be able to eliminate that there's *not* a language issue.  My ds has a super high vocabulary, can do synonyms, etc., and his receptive scores (single sentence, etc.) were MUCH lower.  You could have some language issues lurking in there.  

 

If it's *only* occurring when he goes to write and it doesn't show up in language, maybe he's fine.  I'm just saying those would be the type of tests you're wanting to dig in on the many aspects of language to check for holes.  I was SHOCKED when we found them in ds.  

 

It might be that this program doesn't have enough support and small enough steps for his level of disability.  I'm using Teach Me Language with ds.  It breaks down everything in more steps than I've seen elsewhere.  

[Storygirl]

Dysgraphia can include difficulty with motor skills, as well as difficulty organizing thoughts on paper. In school they call it SLD written expression. So I think his current diagnosis names what you are seeing.

 

http://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/dysgraphia-learning-disability-writing/

 

I have two children who have this diagnosis, but it manifests differently in each of them. I think a third child could get a SLD written expression label if I had her tested.

  * DS12 has both motor issues and problems with getting thoughts onto paper. He does better with creative writing but struggles with writing organized paragraphs with clear main ideas and details for his academic work. He was diagnosed with dysgraphia by a NP and has a lot of writing goals in his IEP at school now.

  * DD10 has dyslexia and got the SLD written expression from the school, due to spelling and mechanics (her writing is sometimes indecipherable, due to spelling), though she has plenty of ideas.

  * DD14 has never been tested, but writing has always been a weakness of hers. She can spell and has good motor skills (handwriting), but her writing is simplistic for her age, and she often simply has no ideas at all. She just can't think of anything to say.

 

All different problems with writing, but if given a label, the school would call each of these things SLD written expression, I think.

 

Problems with writing are frustrating. We've struggled with it a lot here. We've used the Diana Hanbury King books, too. They do provide practice and structure, and I like them for that, but they haven't helped with generating ideas.