How To Treat Dysgraphia

How To Treat It At Home

Parents can take steps early to help a child with dysgraphia succeed. Adopting a relaxed approach to writing and not pressuring the child to 'practice more' or 'try harder' can decrease anxiety related to writing. Parents can invest in a good children's typing program online and help their son or daughter find an alternative to handwriting. When your child is doing handwritten assignments, monitor their hand position in gripping the pencil or pen. Buy pencils with grips to facilitate proper finger placement. It might be helpful to coach your child in saying each word as he writes, as the auditory input makes connections in the brain that will help build letter-forming memory. Dysgraphia presents many challenges, and in considering how to treat it at home, you might offer to help by serving as a scribe to your child. Let her dictate a sentence and you write it. She will write the second sentence, dictate the third one for you, and so on. This gives your child an opportunity to strengthen thought processes and think about what they want to write next. The actual writing can then be done with less anxiety.

Learn about treatments for dysgraphia in a school setting next.

How To Treat It At School

One of the best things teachers can do to help students with dysgraphia is to decrease the pressure associated with the act of writing. Offering alternatives to handwriting allows the student to focus on what he knows instead of the mechanics of writing. Oral testing allows the student to share verbally and strengthen her use of vocabulary and sentence structure. Dysgraphia causes students to need more time to form letters and words. Even filling in circles like the ones often used on standardized tests requires extra time and effort. Removing time limitations from tests can optimize learning and minimize the student's unease with the physical act of writing. When a student is handwriting notes, essays, or test answers, the teacher can relax the requirement for neatness and give credit for effort and substance in what is written. Another adaptation for the student with dysgraphia would be to scale down their assignments and grade on the quality of learning instead of the quantity of feedback produced by hand.

Learn about how technology can help dysgraphia now.