Dysgraphia

A few weeks ago, on Sept. 10, HSLDA sent out an email that I ignored for a few days. Its title was "Some Children Have to Work Too Hard to Learn", and well, that didn't seem to apply to me, so I didn't open it right away. After all, everyone seems to learn just fine, and Nathan and Luke have always been in the 97th percentile in their standardized tests, so no problem.

For some reason I did open the email a few days later, and it was very interesting. Here's an excerpt:

Writing Gate Blocked—When Copying Doesn’t Work

God designed our left brain hemisphere to concentrate on new tasks, such as driving a car, or riding a bike. After concentrated practice, that task is then transferred over the corpus callosum (the brain midline), to the right brain, which is responsible for automaticity of processes. If we imagine the left brain hemisphere as the “thinking (concentrating) brain” and the right hemisphere as the “doing (automatic) brain,” we can see how this transfer allows us to “think and do” at the same time. Then we can think and drive at the same time, or think and ride our bike at the same time.

Generally, when we teach a child how to write, after six months of practice that writing is expected to cross over from the “concentrating brain” to the “automatic brain” so the child can now “think and write” at the same time. For many children, this transfer does not easily occur. Thus, they have to give energy, or a level of concentration, to a task that other children do not have to do. Dr. Mel Levine, in his book One Mind At A Time, calls these blocks, “energy leaks.”
This often solves the mystery of why many children learn their spelling words easily by writing them in a workbook, or writing them five times each, while other children can write words hundreds of times and still not store the spelling word in their long-term memory. Now we realize that these struggling children have to use their “batteries” just for the writing process, so that the learning process cannot occur. Thus, the method of copying to learn is totally ineffective for these children. We need to help them open up their writing gates.

These children are very commonly thought of as “lazy, sloppy or unmotivated.” We, unknowingly, make them re-copy work that is sloppy, not realizing that they have a bona fide writing block. The majority of the time, when a child who loves to listen to mom read stories, but says that he doesn’t like or even “hates” schoolwork, he is struggling with a blocked writing gate.

Hmmm. This actually sounds a lot like Nathan. I kept reading, and here are some characteristics for this "blocked writing gate":

--Frequent or occasional reversals in letters or numbers (after age 7)
--Letters made from bottom to top (vertical reversals)
--Writing is very labor intensive
--Copying takes a long time
--Math problems solved mentally to avoid writing them down
--Writing appears sloppy and child is often considered lazy
--Oral recitation of stories is excellent, but writing is minimal
--Capital and small letters mixed in writing
--In math, lining up numbers in multiplication or division is difficult

Well! Nathan doesn't reverse letters and numbers much anymore, but he used to a lot. And pretty much everything else describes him completely. In fact, the next paragraph in the article could have been written just for him:

No child has all of these characteristics, but if your child has several, you may consider this an area he or she is struggling in. If a child has many of the characteristics, or is over age 9 and still writes reversals, they may be labeled with dysgraphia. Many times these children are considered “gifted with a glitch.” They are excellent in verbal expression, but way behind in written expression. Writing paragraphs and longer papers are something that they take great pains to avoid. They give one-word answers whenever possible.

This is so Nathan. He is excellent at oral narrations, and he remembers what he reads or hears very well, reciting it back in great detail. But try to get him to write about it, and it's like nothing is there. I have Nathan and Luke write a paragraph every morning on some subject I think of (what they learned in co-op, what we talked about in history, where they'd like to vacation--any random thing). Even if it was something described in great and exciting detail (their campout with Bob, for example), I get the most simple, short paragraph possible from Nathan, and a long newsy one from Luke. Or take sermon notes, for example. If Nathan just listens to a sermon, he will remember it all in great detail, but if I make him take notes on it, he remembers next to nothing about it, because he has to concentrate so hard to write anything down.

What was especially interesting is that the next paragraph dealt with things you can to do help them compensate, and I found that we were already doing most of these already:

--Reduce the amount of writing a child needs to do during the day. Do more answers for chapter questions orally. Limit the amount of writing in workbooks.
--Reduce or eliminate copying for 3-6 months. Save the child’s “battery energy” for writing paragraphs, or a paper once a week.
--Use another method of learning spelling words that does not include writing multiple times. Resources include Sequential Spelling or Right Brain Spelling. [We have seen amazing spelling success that I didn't think was possible since we started Sequential Spelling last year.]
--Teach the child keyboarding for some writing projects (However, most children who have dysgraphia, or a writing glitch, also find keyboarding quite labor-intensive also.)

The article also talked about how to correct this glitch, and one thing it mentioned was a book by Dianne Craft. I remembered that Christine McC had gone to a HEAV convention workshop back in June by Dianne Craft, and she had come back talking about something that had sounded very similar to this. I remembered thinking that it sounded a lot like Nathan, in fact. Christine had some exercises for her child to do, so she gave those to me. We're going to try them for awhile--I think it says 6 months--and we'll see what happens. I have occasionally worried about Nathan going off to college and not being able to easily take notes. He has started talking a lot about going to the Academy, and I know something like this would be a huge obstacle to success at a place like that, so it would be absolutely wonderful if we could blow this "writing gate" open!

And now I try to open all my HSLDA emails, LOL.