My Ds having problems writing

peachyprice

Six isn't too young to be assessed, my son was in year one.

While you're at the GP's you could ask him what he thinks and whether he can refer you to the child development centre.

My son's father said the same about labelling him and still won't acknowledge his dyspraxia. Without the 'label' it's so hard to get the help needed, and lets face it our children deserve all the help they are entitled to.

Edit: My son is 16 now, sitting his GCSE's with all exams being scribed and is going on to do A levels. Without the 'label' he would never have done so well.

jopsey

peachyprice wrote: »

Six isn't too young to be assessed, my son was in year one.

While you're at the GP's you could ask him what he thinks and whether he can refer you to the child development centre.

My son's father said the same about labelling him and still won't acknowledge his dyspraxia. Without the 'label' it's so hard to get the help needed, and lets face it our children deserve all the help they are entitled to.

Edit: My son is 16 now, sitting his GCSE's with all exams being scribed and is going on to do A levels. Without the 'label' he would never have done so well.

Hope your son does well and Thankyou so much will keep you posted how I get on deffo going to ring the doctor in the morning too this has given me the confidence to go with my gut feeling x

make_me_wise

At 6 years old children vary greatly in their ability to write. I would also recommend using a triangle grip pencil.

He should be doing all this at school anyway, but in pe alot of work is done with reception and year 1 children to strengthen their arm and finger muscles. This also helps them be spatially aware.

Does his teacher or the class TA do any one-to-one work with him to strengthen his fingers such as forming letters with playdough?

If he is good at putting complex models together it sounds to me like his hand eye co-ordination is good. I would speak with your gp about the other balance issues he seems to have. Sounds a bit more than just being clumsy to me if he suddenly drops to the floor.

peachyprice

Part of the problem with dyspraxic children and handwriting is that they can't think about their handwriting and what they are writing.

My son can write legibly but completely forgets what he is writing about because all his effort is going into forming the letters. You get a sentence that makes no sense but is readable or a fansastic piece of work that is a complete mess.

As for falling down, it's what dyspraxic children do, particularly of they are trying to talk and walk at the same time.

My son got sent home from school a month or two ago with a smashed face, he looked like he'd be in a fight, he had a split lip and black eye, he was trying to walk and text.

Becles

My middle one has messy writing and struggles to get things on paper. If you ask him what he did this evening, he'd go into great detail about going out with his friends, then they got bikes out and you'd know every minuscule detail about the bikes, clothes people were wearing, who said what and so on.

If you asked him to write about his evening it would something like "Went out with friends. Got bikes out. We had fun." and that would be it!

I've made him practice and work out how he can make his writing better. I'd take the sentence "we had fun" and then tell him to add "because" to it and then explain what they did that was fun.

I've talked about books with him and we've looked at descriptive passages and he's understood how the writer wants you to build up an image in your head of something, but you need all the words to help you do that. For example, "the boy" doesn't build an image in your head, but "the tall skinny boy with short brown hair" makes you think about what the boy looks like.

He was in special needs classes in the primary where he had extra lessons in writing and improving fine motor skills. Since he moved to secondary, they said they'd keep him in mainstream classes and see how he goes and he's doing better now. He seems to be better in maths, science and technology, where you don't really have to do a lot of writing.

It is worth getting him tested though. I had mine tested and it was a way of ruling things out and it gave us clearer ways to help him.

jopsey

peachyprice wrote: »

As for falling down, it's what dyspraxic children do, particularly of they are trying to talk and walk at the same time.

My son got sent home from school a month or two ago with a smashed face, he looked like he'd be in a fight, he had a split lip and black eye, he was trying to walk and text.

Gosh i could have written this myself this is one of the reason I am concerned in the last month he has butterfly stiches in his head and 2 first aid incidents in school where they have sent a letter home (which I have a nice collection of lol) It is almost comical I can be walking along with him and the next thing he is on the floor I am that use to it now I just tread over him and carry on as normal it's not like he trips over his feet or anything he just "fall's"

xxdeebeexx

A lovely game for practising writing is :- take it in turns to write something on each others back, with a finger, and try to guess what it is.
The letters should be big to start with, and writen one at a time on top of each other. Later on the whole word can be written and the letters made smaller.

It's a lovely giggley game that should help DS to improve his letter formation.

Good luck

Dx