Dysgraphia in Children Explained

Dysgraphia is a type of writing learning disability that is recognized by Florida public schools.  When a child has dysgraphia writing can be a mentally overwhelming, physically exhausting, and time consuming.  It might be dysgraphia if your child does not enjoy writing and has a negative attitude toward writing.

How Dysgraphia Presents

Children with dysgraphia are not all the same and present in various ways.  Some children with dysgraphia have messy looking handwriting, others have an awkward pencil grasp which fatigues their hand, other child have difficulty quickly copying from the board to their paper, and some are poor spellers.

Furthermore, many children with dysgraphia often have great thoughts and can speak more eloquently than they write.  For example, a recent client’s child had writing difficulty. The boy’s second-grade schoolteacher required weekly homework to write each spelling word in a sentence. Dysgraphia impeded his handwriting and ability to put thoughts onto paper so rather than elaborate sentences, he wrote very simple sentences.  For the word, ‘supper’ he wrote, “I eat supper.” This simple sentence pattern repeated for words such as ‘color’ and ‘inside’ with sentence such as “I like to color.” and “I go inside.” Although the boy correctly used the spelling word, the teacher did not like the simplicity of his sentences and noted this in large red ink on his paper. This was not the child being lazy but rather him coping with dysgraphia. After an evaluation and diagnosis from me, the parent got the school to give her son a 504 Plan to give teachers understanding and her son accommodations.

Causes of Dysgraphia

The causes of dysgraphia may include weak finger control, fine motor difficulty, seeing information one way but writing it a different way, rapid recall from memory difficulty, slow processing speed, working memory weakness or a combination of factors.

Treatment for Dysgraphia

Treatment for dysgraphia can include occupational therapy, working with an educational therapist, home based exercises to increase motor control, keyboarding, and learning writing strategies.

Call to discuss your child as we test students ages 5.5 through college for dyslexia, dysgraphia, ADHD, depression, anxiety, and other processing disorders.  Visit JimForgan.com or call 561.625.4125.