Remediating handwriting difficulties

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I can tell that you definitely "get it."

I think for me, it was making the adjustments, of getting used to typing, finding out what pens and pencils I worked best with when I had to write, and until I got my typing where it needed to be, my 4th grade teacher modified my workload, and part of the time when she didn't, she scribed for me. It seems like every time my writing had been attempted to be remediated, it was a painful process that went no where and I'd rather forget about it just because it was so fruitless for me. Maybe for some other kids not so much trouble, but not me. It seemed like, at least for me, that leaving it alone and letting my coordination develop naturally was the only thing that made the fine motor part of it better over time (I'm no miracle though-- I still have rubbish dysfunctional dysgraphic writing for a 28yo, and the longer of a period I write in a session the worse it gets regardless-- I believe I posted a picture sample of it on the members board in the handwriting thread).

And by coordination developing naturally, just doing things that kids (and people in general) do that enhance coordination. In the beginning I had not so great coordination. I remember being maybe 5, and I remember my older sisters made a garden on the side of the house with poppy flowers, and it was time to collect the seeds and they were going to pour them into a plastic sandwich baggy, I could not cup my hand to pour the seeds into my hand, to then pour them into the baggy to save my life. My sisters got mad at me because I actually dumped the seeds all over the porch because they haphazardly fell out of my hand. Anything that required fine motor coordination, found a way to get dropped onto the floor when I was a kid. I was late on a number of things. I don't remember being told which age, but I was told that I crawled late, I know I didn't walk until I was 13mo from what I was told, and I know from personal memory that I couldn't tie my shoes until I was 7 (and not with the standard method either, still don't tie them the "normal" method way-- I do good 'ol bunny ears, I'm sure Ian's shoelace site has a diagram of it guaranteed). When I was 9, I finally got off training wheels bicycle-wise, I also learned how to swim that year, and then it seemed like everything started picking up from there. I started doing a lot of things with jungle gyms and monkey bars as a kid and that improved my hand and upper body strength. Probably best of all, when I was 10, I took up violin. And that helped me develop fine motor coordination a lot too. Granted, my left hand technique (fingering, shifting) always has been above my right hand technique (bowing), but despite my right hand technique initially lagging farther behind, many things in right hand technique have improved my fine motor coordination quite a bit (everything from how the bow is held, to especially techniques that require a lot of control over the bow, i.e. spiccato aka bouncing the bow on the string-- although that technique isn't taught until about 4 years into playing at least). Just even switching between bowing and pizz'ing (plucking) was a fine motor challenge at first to me though. I remember when I first started getting pieces with switching between the two, I actually a couple of times dropped my bow straight onto the floor. Because part of the trick in that, is having enough fine motor coordination, to hold onto your bow in a confident grip in your other fingers (mostly middle-pinky, less thumb), while you rotate the bow hair-up, to extend your curled index finger to pluck the string. And then un-rotating using the security of the thumb to go back to the bowing position, but with enough direction of the other fingers to not drop the bow. In high school I brought violin to a point where I was concertmistress in orchestra (granted, I was in a crazy dysfunctional urban school of ~930 kids so the competition wasn't exactly fierce as a lot of other schools but I still did things like contest and tryouts and the like, but violin is one of my special interests) Around my teen years I started doing stuff with beadwork too, and that helped some too (especially with seed beads). Crafting, and embroidery too.

It was no miracle, but I did see significant bumps in handwriting ability at ages 9, 13, 16, and 19. I still consider mandatory writing to be stressful (i.e. filling out medical forms, for instance, and especially in that "is it possibly for them to decipher this slop?" sense, and the longer the forms are, the worse it is because I'd find it more exhausting) The person who posted a sample of their child's writing, is strangely exactly how my writing was at those ages too. The bump between 3rd and 4th grades was probably the biggest bump though.

Sure, you can try whatever, but there's no guarantees as to if it'll work or even suit your kid (also keeping mind all the different types of dysgraphia there are and whether or not whichever method will work for those types of dysgraphia as a basis for choosing whatever method, and even this gets complex if it's not picked up upon right away which types the kid struggles with and what their specific struggles are). I think a lot of people are looking for a miracle when there is isn't a solid defined one that fits each and every dysgraphic (aside from typing of course when the skill is proficient enough). I'm not saying that things are hopeless at all. With that said, some of us who roam the parents board are kinda guilty of having a knee-jerk reaction to desire to attempt to protect future generations of children from going through the same pain some of us have been through with our various life experiences. You see it all over this board all the time, and I'm no different in that regard. Sure, it's not true for everyone, but HWT for me was in an incredibly miserable experience. It was dragged out longer than it ever should have been, past the point of it being clearly evident that it just plain wasn't working for me, and everyone refused to believe that it wasn't working at all for me throughout the process and that I should just "work harder" at it (I was already giving my full effort on it) more I should work on it, that I would magically start showing improvement even though all I was doing was getting frustrated and more upset the longer I was dragged through it.

I would've rather been raised as a dysgraphic now than any earlier time though. People KNOW what this thing is now as opposed to earlier times when I had a teacher (my 1st grade teacher) rip up an assignment of mine over 20 years ago, hand me a fresh ditto and explain to me to "try again, this time neater!" or even several teachers of mine dock my grades on written paper by a whole letter grade because "Neatness counts!" or they called me sloppy, lazy, or stupid. Not to say that ignorance about it doesn't exist now because it obviously still does, it's just not as pronounced as it was in earlier times (I can't possibly imagine had I lived in the era of catholic nuns screaming penmenship with slapping yardsticks either *cringe*).

I think that Covuschik hit the nail on the head with the actual process of writing. So many things go into it and if you have a deficit anywhere in there it'll make the process difficult. When the results of your kid's writing is no where representative of their actual ability of their thought process (That's why it's called a deficit) it's almost like it's a completely different kid once they're able to properly type their thoughts into words. I remember my 5th grade teacher was making sure it was really me who did the typed book report because she was so stunned in the difference of two book reports I did-- the typed one was leaps and bounds above the handwritten one in every single way in terms of structure and content. Because when I was writing, I was struggling with fighting the letters that didn't want to form, the spaces that didn't want to space, and my thoughts that are all over the place, to focus on getting what is going through my mind into words and writing it down before my brain gets tripped up and drops the ball the minute my dysgraphia gets in the way. It's like an older computer (from over a decade ago) with cooperative multitasking (Mac OS 9, I'm talking you!!). When you have one program crash (resulting in frustration with handwriting not wanting to cooperate), my brain "runs low on memory" (because then it has to not only be patient in the frustration of the handwriting not wanting to cooperate and hanging onto that task waiting for it to finish, but also retain all the other thoughts you want to put in words and all the other things that were mentioned), and as a result, it becomes too much and brings down all the other programs with it (those programs being your thoughts and the organization of them) and before you know it, you have a frozen brain computer. Then you have to reboot and go, ok, where did I leave off? And hope you can recover whatever direction of what you were thinking in and hoping that you can get back up and finish what you started, or even have a comparable product to what you had in your mind of how you were going to portray your thoughts in the beginning.

Perfectionism bites. I used to struggle with that, and you try to measure up without standing out, and it's impossible because you get judged on your writing anyway.

That yahoo group, I found when I was in college, they are very helpful. & You're right, nobody should ever feel that way (where they tell themselves that they're stupid when they really have a deficit).

With you being unable to read music, I'm not surprised (and I don't mean that in a bad way). Music is heavily tied to math in the way that it's structured. Especially with rhythm. Reading it also uses a lot of the same parts of the brain as math does (why else do you see a bunch of articles stating "kids who do music are better in math and science, blah blah blah"). When you talk about composing it, do you feel it's easier to not abide by conventional time signatures, in favor of odd ones like 5/4? One thing you might find interesting, is if you hook up a program like finale, a midi keyboard, and if you play it out, it'll automatically throw it into notation (granted if things aren't balls-on exact, your husband might go in and clean it up some)

Both of my kids have handwriting troubles, too. The older one (11 y.o.)can type pretty well and use a laptop to write at school. The problem is the writing difficulties is not limited to essays or reports. Can anybody suggest what to with math homework? He writes very slowly so his homework take forever. And he's a perfectionist, too and insist on finishing all plus the bonus parts. DH and I sometimes scribe for him when he gets tired, but I keep feeling like we shouldn't have to do that. My 9 year old's writing is even worse. We did extra printing practice for ages, we still can't read his writing and he still writes some of the strokes backwards. Not sure what to do other than make him use computer, too.

Is anybody interested in advice from a calligrapher on the spectrum? I have taught it to kids and adults for years and have a little bit of a system going.
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I struggled with doing lots of math problems (and hated the teachers who would require, what 70 problems when only 10 were required for me to know how to work the formula, erg, busywork).

There are a couple of math programs, and their names evade me at the moment (one is for younger kids, one is for older ones who do more complex math), but I know the dysgraphia group would know!

I know things were much better in college when I took a math class that used a system on computer. I'm not sure if they use it anymore but it was some kind of ALEKS software or something or another. They probably have it better now, then it was some kind of funky plugin you used in firefox to access the site. For most part the system was good, except if you screwed one small thing up on the review problem the next day in class and then had to do a number of similar problems after that (I wished they had modified that after the next problem I got right to leave me alone and finally get me to do new material).