How did you teach your dyspraxic child to write?

[bluebunny1]

My 5 year old daughter has dyspraxia and really struggles to write / draw. She manages a face at most, maybe some lines and scribbles. She does hold her pen correctly though.

She is currently in reception, and I'm a bit worried about year 1, as it has a lot more emphasis on writing and I don't want her to fall behind.

I have tried the Writing Wizard app, but it hasn't led to any noticeable improvement. She does like to sit down and draw, but the "result" is not recognisable as anything in particular.

We live in Italy, so the access to OT is a bit different, plus there is a language barrier.

If you have a child with DCD (or perhaps have DCD yourself), what has helped him or her to learn to write? Any exercises, apps, activities you would recommend?

Thanks in advance

Bump

With DD2, she was diagnosed in the summer break between reception and year 1.

Start of year 1 was shit - teacher who just didn't believe in SEN reasonable adjustments and I ended up going mildly thermonuclear with the SENCO (who thankfully I got on really well with so she just laughed and handed me a cup of tea when I said I was about fit to go thermonuclear) and the Head and SENCO read the class teacher the riot act.

After that...
We separated out the act of physical handwriting from the act of content production. She took her iPad into school (we used the now discontinued Clicker docs word processor which didn't have the potential to press buttons and lose work like Word did; plus we used the app SnapType Pro to photograph and type onto worksheets) to complete writing tasks on - and then focused on letter formation during handwriting time. That let her actually generate text at her academic level rather than her motorskills level.

Year 2 we got the lovely SENCO as class teacher and the same thing continued, including the agreement that her SATs writing would be marked using her typed work... then fucking Covid hit and we lost half of the year.

Year 3 was shittacular with a junior school whose SENCO "lost" all DD's paperwork and refused to accept her diagnoses - and a class teacher who just yelled at her for her handwriting all the time. We ended up with no playtimes (to rewrite written work), beautiful handwriting, but about 1 sentence written and a child with raging anxiety.... a school change followed.

Now school apparently offer her use of a laptop (I don't believe this one bit) but her handwriting is good enough for her to respond to work in a written format - and she'll get extra time and a staff member to focus prompt her (she has inattentive ADHD as well) for her SATs. I'm waiting to get in touch with the SENCO of the secondary school she's going to to start negotiating reasonable adjustments there (I know the school will be good and supportive - my eldest child is already there).

Rather than focusing just on writing/drawing try building fine and gross motor skills more generally. Improving gross motor skills, particularly in the core/arms/shoulders, will help fine motor skills.

Look at activities such as throwing and catching, wheelbarrow walking, hula hooping (gross motor skills), threading beads, kneading bread, Lego, using tongs to pick up and move small items from one bowl to another. Have a look at this website.

@DoNotScrapeMyDataBishes thank you so much for sharing your experience, it is interesting you say about separating creating content from physical writing.
Can I ask what extra support your daughter receives at school? I feel like our SENCO is quite clueless...

@Headfirstintothewild thank you for your comment, she is doing quite a lot of sport at the moment (5 sessions per week), so it is definitely helping her coordination, although I can't see it feeding into her writing yet. Thanks for the helpful link as well!

Mine gets very little in the way of support these days - it's mainly reassurance and retrieval of lost belongings because her organisation skills are really really really dyspraxic these days (she managed to forget her skirt to go to school earlier this year!) - academically she's bright so she just about holds her own (the pandemic really did impact her and she took a good couple of years to get caught up).

She had more support further down the school in terms of focused handwriting time and shoulder/arm/finger strengthening groups because she has low muscle tone as a result of it all; also TA time to go through activities from a private SALT because her speech was also quite badly affected by dyspraxia as well. When we moved her school (after the disaster of year 3 transitioning into juniors) she moved to a really tiny school (15 in the year group) so she doesn't get "lost" in it all and the class teacher is the SENCO who I work quite closely with (I have a bit of a funny background as an ex primary teacher and then I career changed to be a SALT so the teacher does tend to listen to me a lot).

When she gets to secondary they'll make sure she has a locker to have a base to leave belongings and a keyworker TA to support her and check in on her and liase between home and school, plus extra transition sessions etc (and a sister trying to micromanage and organise her as well).

In terms of sport that someone mentioned - my daughter does kickboxing which has really benefitted her in terms of her muscle strength and focus (and confidence in not taking shit from silly preteen boys). Swimming was a long but essential (both sets of grandparents live on riverbanks) slog to get out of the beginning stages and she's a functional but not massively strong swimmer.

Climbing was great as well - we do take her to local climbing wall places when we can again to work on muscle strength - we had some exercises to do from OT when she was younger which were things like being on hands and knees and making towers out of building blocks (forcing her to take the weight on her other arm and shoulder at a time).

@DoNotScrapeMyDataBishes this is all such useful advice, thank you. Your daughter sounds awesome and you sound massively on top of everything supporting her!

It is reassuring to hear that she has less support now (although I can see how planning is an ongoing challenge, for us also I'm sure).