PDA - tips for helping a kid with handwriting when they HATE it

[Somanymistakes]

Homeschooling help please!

DS 9 doesn’t have PDA but he has something and we are in the middle of assessments. He is bright and great at maths. Writing, comprehension and organising/thoughts are a huge issue though.
He can spell very well, strangely.

He is so behind at writing and the school really think there isn’t a problem although he has already had therapy and CAMHS involvement for self harm ideation and suicidal thoughts. His teenage brother has adhd, Tourette’s, hyper mobility, OCD, dyspraxia. His dad is autistic.

DS has been assessed by OT who said he didn’t score as a problem they would deal with.

His anger and frustration are what I need help with. When asked to do something he finds hard he shuts down, becomes and angry and sometimes aggressive.

I’m not saying he has PDA but I wonder if techniques to deal with and motivate a child with it, would help us. Straight requests to work just lead to confrontation because he finds writing so hard and has such low confidence and self esteem.

When things get back to normal I’m going to get his processing assessed. He’s clumsy too. He falls over when surprised but is co-ordinated.
His traits don’t seem to fit anything well but I know we are missing something.

Any help or tips would be really useful. Thank you.

Sounds like our son who is autistic. He hated writing and would go ballistic if he made a mistake.

He was allowed to use a laptop at school which got round the actual physical handwriting and making mistakes. With the actual writing tasks themselves -if you can break them down into more manageable chunks that might help.Also google mind mapping. It makes things more visual which sometimes helps.

Would a whiteboard help as he can easily rub away mistakes.
Is it the actual handwriting thats and issue! Or the process of writing - like he doesnt know where to begin.

Thank you @Ellie56 and @wagtailred

I will look at mind mapping. I do break things down into small chunks and have breaks, writing structures and plans. It doesn’t seem to help much. My eldest used a laptop but I think ds2 needs to learn to write a bit better first and using a laptop now would mean he never had that skill. He has the fine motor control so that isn’t the problem. I don’t think the insistence that everyone uses cursive helps him. The need for one letter to be joined to the next just seems to make it dven harder for him.

He forgets what we have just talked about when writing - so if we discuss the answer to a comprehension question and agree on the answer - even a short sentence, he gets very stressed and forgets it. Creative writing is the worst. Just so painful. He melts down and gives up immediately. His unhappiness presents as anger but then it does in all of us. I’m the only one who has learnt to recognise that and address it. He finds any form of writing overwhelming, whether it be a birthday card to his best mate or a story. He is unable to think of what to write for anything and just gets upset and angry and shuts down. It’s very frustrating not being able to pinpoint the problem and help him. He isn’t open to help or finding a way of making it easier. He just wants to avoid the whole issue and will use all his energy to do that rather than accept help and work out how to try to deal with it.

I have a better picture now. A lot of children with autism find writing hard fot the reasons you mention. (Not trying to internet disgnose) other suggestions are that children can find it hard to get started so write the first letter or word for him. Also faced with a unstructed page is hard so either drawing some lines to fill or highlighting the amount of lined area the sentance would fill can help e.g the birthday card woukd have one line at the top and one line at the bottom and suddenly he isnt filling a whole page anymore.
Id also personally have a break for the summer (start summer early for writing) and not worry about cursive either. But thats just my opinion.

Ive just remembered my friends chikd who has dyslexia forgets things too -so literally on the paper that is being written on - the teacher would write prompts they had discussdd. There is no time to forget then. Even ptompts written on a board dont work as by the time he has looked down there is too much processing going on.

Maybe being asked to physically write and think what to write at the same time is just too much to contend with, so if he has to write a story or an article, let him use a laptop or alternatively, you scribe for him with him telling you what to write.

If you want him to practise hand writing he could do this by just copying the words of a poem or something that you have already modelled in perfectly beautiful cursive writing.

My son absolutely hated doing school work at home and was hugely stressed out by it. Someone explained to me that children with autism live their lives in boxes. There is a home box and a school box, School things (homework etc) belong in the school box and home things belong in the home box. Problems arise because you are trying to put something that clearly belongs in the school box into the home box. Could this be the issue here?

But if your son is getting very stressed out I would leave it, as getting this worked up about stuff is not good for his mental health, and it is unlikely he will be learning anything in any case. It can't be good for the rest of the family either hearing his distress every day.

Home educating is not meant to be this difficult. You have tried and if it's not working, it's time to do other things instead. Sharing books, researching a topic of interest, watching and discussing the news etc.

Has your son had an EP assessment? That might help to pinpoint where his problems lie.

This sounds a lot like my son, who is autistic and also we think dyspraxic. My son also struggles with handwriting.

Lockdown as been awful for my son, because as mentioned above, he does not want to do school work at home and he became very angry and aggressive when I pushed it.

Does your son have any interests you could exploit? Would he want to write a quiz for friends, or send coded letters? Does he like Minecraft - we have bought "writing for minecrafters", it's an American series so not our curriculum but it has at least got my DS writing something.

DD2 has dyspraxia and some episodes of fairly rigid thinking and she hit an absolute wall with her writing a year or so ago - would sob in tears that her letters don't stay on the line where she tries to put them. (She did have a shitty teacher that year and was quite young in terms of them still being keen for her to learn correct letter formation etc rather than learn to type).

In the end after numerous other issues with the teacher from hell, I got together with the SENCO and we agreed to try her typing more of her work and separate out the teaching handwriting element of stuff from the content composition element of things and it took the pressure off her completely. She became more willing to write if she could type it (she used her own iPad as the school wasn't one that's well set up for technology and I put apps on it so she could work without pressing the wrong button and making it go funny - she was using the app version of Clicker which has now been discontinued annoyingly) and then handwriting was a separate lesson slot.

This year she'd made such progress and the good teacher had switched to sometimes doing a first draft typed and then writing up a final version by hand - she would be visibly exhausted after doing so - but she'd really made progress by the time lockdown happened and fucked up everything. She also sometimes finds recording a sentence and then replaying it while she writes it down helps her out as well.

We have quite similar issues - processing and memory, spatial issues/visual processing also fine motor too.

We practice for 15 mins a day - no more. He gets 15 mins golden time (towards an hour of play station). We break the process into chunks -

1. Choose a topic of their choice (dragons).

1. He says what he wants to write and I scribe it in pencil.

We do not do cursive it just adds to the burden.

1. Next day he gets a pen and traces over the words to complete the short paragraph.

He grumbles when asked to do any writing task as he has 'failed' so many times (5 years of education) but he does find this short and sweet intervention manageable.

I step away and just give him a sand timer when it comes to him writing so he doesn't feel like I'm stood over him looking at any mistakes. We have done this since March and seems to work OK.
I promise him we just do 1 writing task a day but we do have to practice. We sometimes change it up and do fill in the blanks work or even just pre writing patterns if we can find things suitable.

He is also learning to type, which will be his main method of recording in future.