Each week we will be sharing a tip from our school psychologist, Mrs. Rollins.

This week we are talking about – What is Dysgraphia?

Dysgraphia is a neurological disorder of written expression where the individual has difficulty turning their thoughts into writing for their age or cognitive level despite having adequate instruction. It is usually identified as a child learns to write.

Children’s writing develops as follows:

1.  Ages 0-2: preliterate -scribbling or drawing and telling a story about it
2.  Ages 2-4: emergent- letters appear in their scribbles as recognition that letters are important. The letters are usually in their name, names of family members, or signs they see like stop and park.
3.  Ages 4-7: transitional- children start trying to match letters to sounds so they may use invented spelling (mi kat z hape for my cat is happy) or reverse letters. It’s normal for these mistakes to occur as they learn.

Dysgraphia can co-occur with ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder, but it is not caused by those conditions.

The two forms of Dysgraphia:

• Acquired Dysgraphia occurs when a person has had a brain injury, disease, or degenerative condition that causes them to lose previously acquired writing skills.
• Developmental Dysgraphia is when a child has difficulty acquiring writing skills and has 3 subtypes: Motor (difficulty with the fine-motor process of writing), Spatial (difficulty with letter spacing and drawing), and Linguistic (spontaneously written text is illegible, but copying is fine).

Like most learning disabilities, Dysgraphia cannot be cured and just more practice will not fix it, but intervention and accommodations can help an individual with Dysgraphia successfully manage their condition.

Attitude Magazine and the Cleveland Clinic have both published on this topic if you are interested in reading more about it. 

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