Jackson was officially diagnosed with Dysgraphia last month.
Dysgraphia is a learning difference that affects handwriting.
Handwriting has always been hard for Jackson. There’s a whole lot of motor planning involved; add weak fine motor skills to the mix and the struggle is real.
He spent years writing only capital letters and still prefers that to writing lowercase. In kindergarten, his principal made him erase his sight words and start over because he had written them in all caps. Ugh! I was so annoyed.
At nine-years-old, Jackson still writes big and doesn’t space his words properly. He avoids handwriting. He can only write a sentence or two before getting tired. He works on handwriting each week at OT. We make many accommodations in our homeschool to make handwriting less painful.
We write with dry erase markers on a white board a lot.
We write with sidewalk chalk on the driveway.
We do a lot of our school work orally.
Jackson solves the math problems and I write down the answers.
We’ve considered teaching Jackson how to type, but that involves so much motor planning and strong finger dexterity. He’s just not ready for typing.
Not long after his diagnoses, I stumbled across this blog post about the benefits of teaching children with Dysgraphia how to write in cursive.
I was intrigued.
I had never thought about cursive; but it makes SO much sense!
A few reasons why I decided we would give cursive a try:
- Jackson still writes with his whole hand; but with cursive this won’t be that big of a deal. You move your whole hand and don’t have to pick up your pencil as often. Cursive isn’t as fine-motor intensive.
- Working on this handwriting curriculum will still be great fine motor practice.
- Learning how to write in cursive will also be a way for us to reinforce and work on our phonemes.
So, we started learning our first cursive letters last night.
We are using Rhythms of Handwriting by Logic of English. I love that it’s multi-sensory. We traced the letters (they feel like sandpaper) with our fingers and then I helped him write the letters (hand over hand). Then he practiced writing them on his whiteboard. We will move on to pencil and paper after we get the hang of it.
Jackson was a little hesitant at first, but then I found him practicing on his own.
I’m hopeful that learning cursive will take some of the stress out of handwriting.