This is the final post in Karen Hollis’s three-part series; be sure to read Parts One and Two as well.
But what about writing itself? How do you go about improving the handwriting, much less the drafting of paragraphs and essays, of a dysgraphic child?
One of your early goals will be to develop physical writing fluency and stamina. In many dysgraphic kids it will be years before the process of letter formation becomes automatic; they tend to have to think through how to “draw” a letter’s shape each time. Needless to say, this slows them down and frustrates them tremendously. Trying to combine other intellectual, visual, or motor tasks with simple letter retrieval can be overwhelming. For a long time they are not going to write what we think of as “proper” writing: formal sentences with proper punctuation and grammar, paragraphs, essays. Even handwriting practice it itself can become a source of frustration and despair if a child feels perpetually stuck in the land of shaping letters rather than doing something meaningful with writing.
So what you need to do is harness basic letter formation practice to something they find compelling, in a format or genre that doesn’t take too much work. For example, take the humble list. The List was my daughter’s main genre for years on end. Make lists with your child (do not give a list as an assignment to do in solitude): lists of favorite books, Lego transformers, wish-lists, cartoon superheroes, friends’ and relatives’ birthdays, planets and stars and solar systems, requested desserts, types of dinosaurs or monsters, anything and everything that piques their interest yet is utterly familiar to them. This way they can concentrate on the physical process writing, acquiring fluency without an additional task to complicate things.
Don’t forget that kids of all ages, including even junior high, often like to experiment with letter shapes and forms: curlicue letters, science-fiction-y fonts, decorated initials, etc. This can become a really fun family project in which you collect examples of fonts, watch the PBS documentary “Helvetica,” look up pictures of old manuscripts and early printed books, design your own illuminated letters, write your name in Viking runes, etc. My daughter is taken at the moment with looking at translations of various things into Klingon. An interest in shape and form, the material basis of writing, is an important part of the larger world of writing. Don’t be quick to dismiss it as fluff. Looking closely at other fonts or alphabets, even pictographs, is a step toward internalizing what is unique about our own alphabet and letter shapes.
List-making and letter play are the first steps toward gradually – VERY gradually – longer pieces of writing, still interest-related. The next step involves phrases or single sentences. Again, this is ideally done in the form of a game, a social activity, or a project that takes the stress of performance anxiety out of the picture. Peggy Kaye’s Games For Writing is treasure trove of ideas about how to turn the practice of various aspects of the writing process into socially reciprocal games. There are hundreds of further ideas in If You’re Trying to Teach Kids How to Write, You’ve Got to Have This Book, by Marjorie Frank; and Families Writing, by Peter Stillman. Don’t grade anything; don’t correct it for grammar or spelling, however hard it may be to rein in your inner grammar freak. At this point writing for fluency should be separate from work on mechanics. Practice or activities should also occur in several short sessions of five- to ten-minute sessions a day rather than in a single, longer lump.
Most dysgraphic kids have spelling problems as well. These problems can stem from so many different kinds of processing deficits that you will need long-term, formal spelling work. But your child may learn visually; he or she may learn phonetically; or you might have a child who uses both approaches. My daughter began to memorize the spelling of each individual word that gave her trouble by making up a phrase or story about the order of the letters: “You can have an apple, OR you can have AN orange” was her way to remember the first four letters of the word orange. She memorized “heir” from the Harry Potter books, and made up some kind of story I no longer remember about the word “heir” being inside “their.” This wasn’t going to work as a full-scale spelling strategy, clearly. But it took both of us a long time to figure out how she best learned (she’s a combo kid).
There are any number of methodical spelling programs out there, many of which seem perfectly fine to me. I’m not wedded to what worked for us as the single program that will help. But as far as lightening the written load again: work alternately in oral and written spelling. Allow your child to spell with Scrabble or other letter tiles. Play spelling games: Wheel of Fortune is a grand spelling game in disguise, and there any number of others marketed by educational companies: my daughter likes WordFlip, which is very similar to Wheel of Fortune. But there’s also plain old hangman. And my daughter’s spelling was greatly improved by lots of playing a game I used to amuse myself with in grade school when the teacher wasn’t looking: you write out one longish word, like chocolate or spaceship, and then form as many littler words from those letters as you can.
Don’t make the study of grammar entirely worksheet-bound either. Read Ruth Hellman’s lovely picture books about parts of speech, and Lynn Truss’s hilarious picture book versions of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. Print out words from different grammatical categories on slips of paper, different colors for different parts of speech, and build sentences beginning with noun-verb, gradually adding on and becoming more and more elaborate (and silly). Peggy Kaye has a few games similar to this. Have a hunt for misspelled and ungrammatical public signs, advertisements, or the like. Play MadLibs.
As your child begins to (ever so slowly) improve in handwriting legibility, stamina, and spelling, begin to incorporate small bits of writing into other areas and subjects. Experiment with different ways to do this, depending on your child’s interests and abilities. Your child can write longer captions for drawings and photographs of science experiments, for example; can draw a political cartoon and fill in thought bubbles for history; can do pre-writing exercises like making a T-chart of pros and cons, causes and consequences; can begin outlining short articles using phrases rather than complete sentences or making a graphic representation of the article. One really useful, relatively painless way to work on sifting out the main idea is to cut off or black out the title of an article, poem, or other short piece of writing and have your child come up with an alternate title, then see how close you come to the author’s. Instead of elaborating supporting evidence in full sentences, allow your child to write single words or phrases.
Writing at this level can go on for an awfully long time in a dysgraphic kid. Try not to give in to the urge to push your child further too quickly; this is an incubation stage where important things are happening beneath the surface. Ideally, what you are hoping for is the discovery that writing can happen in all kinds of arenas, for all kinds of purposes, not just in essays and homework that someone else assigns.
Above all, DO NOT push the draft/revise model of written work on a dysgraphic child too soon. Keep revision and editing on hold for a bit longer. The physical labor involved in copying and rewriting what was already difficult the first time around will alienate your child from the whole writing process more quickly than just about anything. Yes, revision is a crucial skill. Yes, a child should be able to edit and correct his writing. If your child is already using the keyboard easily, you can work on revision; but if you’re still working with handwriting, ease off. It will happen.
How will you know when your child is ready for more? I suspect this will vary dramatically among dysgraphic kids. But my daughter was able, by around age eleven, to write spelling lists of up to thirty or so words at one sitting without undue fatigue. She needed to get up and shake out her fingers afterwards, but she could get through all those words. The lists she wrote on her own, connected to her free play, got longer and longer too, often taking up an entire page. She was beginning to recognize her own spelling mistakes and write words over without being prompted. She could line up numbers well enough to write out long division and multiplication problems (we used graph paper at first, which helped, but she moved on to regular paper). At one point when she was working on a posterboard display on a favorite book, rather than dictating to me as she usually did and pasting the paragraphs under her drawings or clay models or whatever else she found to glue onto the board, she wanted to write them herself. She wanted to google things she found of interest on the web by herself rather than having to ask me to type in the search words for her. In other words, writing was becoming not something she feared and resisted, but something she pursued on her own initiative.
Some kids will have enormous difficulty making the transition to formal, expository paragraphs. Ease up on them; they’re not ready. Begin with utterly familiar, understandable structures for them to fill in and show what they’re learned, such as an alphabet book (for an older elementary child, read G is for Google for inspiration, to move away from the idea that an alphabetical presentation is necessary baby stuff). Or use a chronological structure for a homemade booklet of, say, a robotics project, having your child document progress with photographs and bits of writing. What you are looking for is a way to make the actual overall structure a given, so that your child will not be struggling with so many elements of writing at once.
Don’t overlook the fact that many dysgraphic kids are highly visual learners; let their responses to other texts and subjects draw on this strength. Let them make maps, draw flow charts and diagrams, look at or draw blueprints, architectural drawings, scale models, patent designs (you can find a lot of historical patent applications on-line). They can write brief passages to complement their visual presentations rather than have writing bear the entire weight of the matter. There are whole sets of books that offer manga or comic book versions of physics, calculus, chemistry, history. See whether your child might be interested in doing a comic version of an event in history, in which each panel would represent an important event or factor leading up to a conflict or political decision of some kind. Look at the history of political cartoons, and make cartoons of current events or from the time period you’re currently studying.
The point is not to put the entire burden of an assignment on writing, but to mix that up with drawing, painting, extensive researching, building, or other ways of interacting with content – to engage a child’s enthusiasm, to build confidence in a child who is probably used to thinking of himself or herself as unable to write well. Open up definition of writing in order to let go of a history of struggle with particular forms or requirements.
Dysgraphic children will produce full paragraphs or short essays much later than most kids; but they will make up for that late start, provided they have the groundwork under their belts. They will most likely take tremendous leaps in terms of ability in much the same way that late readers often move from not being able to read a word to reading chapter books or even adult fiction within weeks. There is no need to worry that they have not had sufficient practice in essay writing at younger ages. By the time their hands catch up to the rest of their brains, or the different parts of their minds become sufficiently interconnected to allow them to write independently, they will also have progressed in terms of logic and ability to understand more abstract and/or advanced concepts. If you’ve read and discussed books across subject areas, they will have plenty of information to work with when they begin to write, have more to say and a better ability to explain it clearly than younger children struggling to learn to manage both at the same time. The complexity of their thoughts will have had room to move ahead rather than be tied to the lower level of their written ability.
Dealing with dysgraphia requires some very, very difficult acts from you as a homeschooling parent. It requires you to suspend reliance on timetables, to let go of what your child “should” be producing at any given age. It requires you to think of education, and the place of writing in education, far differently than you probably did before. Hardest of all, though, is sitting back and waiting, waiting for those brain connections to develop and mature, trusting that they will, trusting that your child can and will be able to write.
But the more you can take the pressure off both of you, the more you can make writing a tool not only of serious thought but of pleasure and play, the more you make it a social endeavor connected to the wider world and not just to academia, the more you discover the different ways it can be used and the different forms it can take – the easier the process will be.