top tips, resources, programs, and accommodations for dysgraphic students

[Anonymous]

What has been most helpful for your dysgraphic child?

[Anonymous]

Speech to text and learning to type, both as early as possible.

[Anonymous]

My child is almost 18, so perhaps some of these programs have improved since he was younger, but Speech to Text was not useful to us. All apps/programs had a very hard time with children's voices and were wildly inaccurate.

Certainly learning to type ASAP. We used a great program called TTRS (Touch Type Read Spell, I think) meant for dyslexics and did a few minutes per day for many years. I think it helped enormously with spelling skills as well.

We used graph paper in math (I would print out 1 cm graph paper). Honestly, my son's dysgraphia is too severe for this to be helpful longterm but it was useful when it was absolutely necessary for him to, for example, line up multiplication and division calculations accurately.

ModMath app was indispensable. (Again, there may be newer apps but this was the only one at the time.)

I scribed a lot and this was a critical part in his continuing to develop Math skills and and "writing" (composition) skills.

Dedicated (outside of school!) study of writing skills. We used several classical homeschool programs, which do a great job of breaking apart the different tasks involved in writing.

For us, unfortunately, handwriting without tears, learning to write cursive, and OT were all useless. I don't regret the hours and years we spent on them and fully recognize that they are critical for most people. My child has extremely severe dysgraphia and will never be able to hand write legibly at a practical speed. In retrospect, we should have given up practicing them a lot sooner (and to their credit, the school said this several years before I agreed to stop trying.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My child is almost 18, so perhaps some of these programs have improved since he was younger, but Speech to Text was not useful to us. All apps/programs had a very hard time with children's voices and were wildly inaccurate.

Certainly learning to type ASAP. We used a great program called TTRS (Touch Type Read Spell, I think) meant for dyslexics and did a few minutes per day for many years. I think it helped enormously with spelling skills as well.

We used graph paper in math (I would print out 1 cm graph paper). Honestly, my son's dysgraphia is too severe for this to be helpful longterm but it was useful when it was absolutely necessary for him to, for example, line up multiplication and division calculations accurately.

ModMath app was indispensable. (Again, there may be newer apps but this was the only one at the time.)

I scribed a lot and this was a critical part in his continuing to develop Math skills and and "writing" (composition) skills.

Dedicated (outside of school!) study of writing skills. We used several classical homeschool programs, which do a great job of breaking apart the different tasks involved in writing.

For us, unfortunately, handwriting without tears, learning to write cursive, and OT were all useless. I don't regret the hours and years we spent on them and fully recognize that they are critical for most people. My child has extremely severe dysgraphia and will never be able to hand write legibly at a practical speed. In retrospect, we should have given up practicing them a lot sooner (and to their credit, the school said this several years before I agreed to stop trying.)

I have a 15yo with severe dyslexia and dysgraphia. All of this is really good advice. We started keyboarding instruction in 4th grade and moved to almost exclusively using a computer for writing by middle school. We did not focus on handwriting remediation after that point. The problems with spelling, capitalization, and punctuation carry over to type written composition, so we did continue to work on that aspect as well as using spellcheck/grammar check as an aid.

For math, even without graph paper, you can turn regular lined paper 90 degrees to help line up stacked numbers. We just bought graph paper notebooks off Amazon and kept him supplied with those.

Being able to use a computer for note taking is an important accommodation (or getting a copy of someone else's notes).

[Anonymous]

Thanks all for your recs. I just subscribed to the touch type read spell program!