Sometimes, we really are on autopilot!

Our days are full of things we do without ever thinking about them.  We sign our name.  We cook a familiar recipe.  We drive to an often-visited location. We lock up for the night and get ready for bed.  A part of our brain which knows how these mundane tasks are performed takes over and we slip into automaticity. This is a good thing, because it frees us for other tasks which do require brain power!

Children with dyslexia struggle to put mundane language tasks into the automatic category.  Direct and explicit instruction along with many practice sessions are needed to help the child understand and master a language task.

Dysgraphia

Dysgraphia is confusion with the writing process.  It may be letter formation confusion, inability to write sentences, or a tendency to write sentences out of order so a story does not flow very well.  It is often surprising to read the written work of a dysgraphic child with outstanding storytelling skills, because you are expecting so much more than what you see on paper.

Eric’s story

Eric came to join our second grade small group in January.  This is his writing sample. 

When I look at this writing, I notice the labored letters, the many erasures, the mix of upper and lower case in the alphabet.  My notes tell me the alphabet took Eric three minutes and 23 seconds to complete.  This is a task which probably takes his classmates under 1 minute to correctly complete. We can safely say that writing does not come automatically to Eric.

The path to automaticity

We were making the switch to cursive writing in second grade small group, and Eric tearfully tried his best to form the unfamiliar letters.  A lot of tracing large, tactile letters, airplane writing, tracing in tubs of raw rice and onto bumpy boards helped clarify in his mind the way each letter was to be formed.  Eric is a master story teller, and often made up stories for the group about what was happening to “the guy” whose path our letter traced.  The effort payed off, Eric’s tears dried up and he began to smile as the cursive notebooks were passed out.  Recently, each lower case letter was mastered and we moved to capitals.

Success!

This is a recent writing sample, about three months the first one,  from Eric’s journal.  The alphabet took him 57 seconds to complete, as as you can see, it is legible  and all in cursive lower case letters. There were a couple of errors, but overall, a big improvement!

Below the alphabet are letters I called out in random order for the students to write down.  This mini-quiz shows me which letters are not yet automatic for each child.  Eric wrote all of his with no erasures!  He has hit the automatic gravy train!

The sentence at the bottom of the work is an example of why cursive writing is great for kids with dyslexia.  If you look at his earlier work, all the words crowd together without spaces between.  This is another characteristic of dysgraphia, called word boundary issues.  Cursive writing helps this problem because the letters within the word are connected, but there is a break between each word.  An instant reminder to give it a little space.

After successfully writing the page above, Eric smiled his endearing, crooked smile as he shyly told me, “ Wow! I can do this automatically!” Yup, that is the goal for each child.