Dysgraphia is a term that simply means “difficulty with written tasks.” This may lead from hand writing issues to written work assignments or attempting exam papers.
Children with Dysgraphia or an expressive writing disorder can struggle to construct sentences and paragraphs in a grammatical or logical order, making any form of written composition a difficult task. They experience difficulty with capitalizations, punctuations, tense- verb confusion, and also to put their creative ideas on paper. Usually, these children are very bright and perform well orally but written work makes it so difficult for them to even pass.
Symptoms
The following are some of the most common symptoms:
- Handwriting is illegible
- Child writes very slowly and gets fatigued easily
- Fingers are cramped in a tight grasp or child uses an unusual grasp
- Written work is inconsistent with a combination of upper and lower case letters, variation in sizes of letters and irregular formation and slant
- Child uses a lot of cross-outs and erasures while writing
- Child has difficulties keeping the writing on line or within margins
- Child has many reversals of letters and numbers, writes words backwards, writes letters out of order, and has very sloppy handwriting
What does IMPACT do?
Remediation and accommodations are the most important elements in helping a student with Dysgraphia.
Most problems can be prevented with early intervention and early training. Young children in kindergarten and first grade should learn to form letters correctly using a multisensory writing program. Using auditory, visual and kinesthetic memory is powerful in training the brain of a child with Dysgraphia.
Dysgraphia is treated by using the Orton-Gillingham approach, which is a structured language program that provides focused instruction on multiple aspects of letters and letter formations, and use of language overall with its grammatical issues. .