Dysgraphia: What It Is and What We Need to Know

PSN Ep 38-DYSGRAPHIA- what it is a what parents need to know

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DYSGRAPHIA: What parents need to know

In today’s Parenting Special Needs Podcast’s Purposeful Conversation, we’re talking with Cheri Dotterer.

She is the author of Handwriting Brain-Body DisConnect: Adaptive teaching techniques to unlock a child’s dysgraphia for the classroom and at home.

Did you know that 33% of elementary students have difficulty with handwriting? That’s one in three students!

Dysgraphia is the difficulty of writing by hand that does have another neurological origin or diagnosis. It can be co-morbidly linked to ADHD but is its own diagnosis. It’s everywhere: Starting with actually forming a letter on a piece of paper all the way through to having some kind of conversation on paper. That means paragraphs, letter writing, writing stories, and all of that conversational speech that we do every day, orally, that needs to be put on paper.

How can my child read, but not be able to write?

~ Cheri Dotterer

Schools are not obligated to test students until they have at least six months of data. This is why it’s important for you, the parents/caregiver, to be cautious of any delay in the ability to write from the preschool days moving forward. If so, it may yield a diagnosis. Through different literature and research, Cheri has been able to identify 18 different symptoms and goes into detail explaining what to look for with all of them. To name a few, early signs might include avoiding writing tasks, letters and numbers may be reversed, writing speed is much slower than that of their peers and so many more.

Handwriting is the key to unlocking complete literacy. ~Cherri Dotterer

Help might be simpler than you think through practice, patience, and play…yes you heard that right. You can change the neurological process in your child’s brain. Play is a huge part of your child’s brain development. Technology and electronics are allowing everyone to push and touch things, instead of moving and bending fingers to make them stronger. Playing outside or on a playground gives your child the opportunity to rush through that resistance and build strong hand muscles.