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Dysgraphia & Boys
Dysgraphia Examples
Helping Students with
Dysgraphia
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What It Takes to Write
Signs of Dysgraphia
- Incomplete work
- Homework Wars - hours to complete short assignments
- Irregularly written letters, poor spacing, poor
spelling and grammar
- Persistent reversals after the age of 7
- Negative self-talk, Hiding work
- Writing can be neat, but very slow!
- Close visual monitoring while writing
- Beyond early elementary school, dictation much better
than writing
- Trouble writing the alphabet
There are many factors that influence fluent, automatic
writing, and careful analysis of written work can help
target how you might be able to help.
Copying Letters
Writing often
starts with individual letters - and even simple letter
copying requires visual perception (seeing the letter,
recognizing spatial relationships), fine motor
coordination (hold the pen), motor imitation (imitating
the movement making the line), motor inhibition
(stopping movement at the appropriate time), and sensory
and visual feedback (to monitor accuracy of movements
and correct errors visually).
In order to copy letters quickly, a child also has to be
able to quickly recall how to position fingers to hold a
pencil, the sensory-motor plans for the making of the
letter, and the correct directionality of the movement.
Copying Words
Copying words requires all of the skills above, but it
is also more demanding visually (looking up at the
example, then down at the writing in progress, accurate
reading of letters in their correct order) and spatially
(correct orientation and spacing between letters), and
when performed quickly, visual memory for the letters in
sequence.
Free Writing
Free writing is a
much more challenging task than copying, because it
requires much more in terms of memory and planning. When
a big gap exists between copying words and being able to
write them to dictation, students usually have problems
with their visual word memory or a limited working
memory.
Working memory is a short term type of memory that helps
keep information "in mind" to finish a task. In some
children long term memory may be strong, but working
memory weak - so that they can learn very well as long
as some care is taken how tasks are undertaken or
presented.
With story or non-fiction writing, writing in response
to prompts or otherwise, cognitive demands now include
formulate ideas, translating them into words, retrieving
correct word meaning, spelling, sentence organization
and grammar conventions, and the other mechanics of
writing - how letters look and how they are formed, etc.
Sometimes students with clear-cut talents in their fund
of knowledge or verbal ability appear stymied because
they don't know how or where to begin with answering an
open-ended question.
It should come as no surprise, then that many students
who dutifully practiced copying letters and sentences,
might meltdown when asked to do their first
spontaneously written work. When this occurs, parents
and teachers should look for ways to break out the
different steps of the writing process - single word
dictation, fill-in the blank word choice, narrated
responses, etc. to chunk the process into smaller steps.
For writer's block, parents and teachers may need to be
more ingenious, tapping into student's interests, strong
opinions, or sense of humor. Children with
organizational challenges may benefit from writing
curricula that show plenty of examples, and step-wise
practice with persuasive or colorful writing.
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