Teaching Children with Dysgraphia

Helping Students with Dysgraphia in the Classroom

There are several different areas where students with dysgraphia may need more help and support than their peers. These include routine support in the classroom and with homework, and with both completing assignments, and doing tests or assessments. It is feasible to break down support into three areas:

Remediation: helping students with dysgraphia to improve their skills in writing;
Accommodations: providing alternatives or additional support to avoid the student needing to write; and
Modifications: changing tasks for everyone to make them more inclusive.

Remediation Strategies

Remediation strategies are those that help students with dysgraphia to improve their writing skills.

Our page on Coping with Dysgraphia explains that people with dysgraphia may find it helpful to work on their muscle strength. You might therefore encourage students in your classroom to knead a ball of plasticine, or do exercises that increase their hand and arm strength. If you teach younger children, this will be helpful for everyone, because improving hand and arm strength will generally improve muscle control and therefore writing ability.

Warming up before writing can also help.

You could encourage all the children to 'warm up' their hand muscles before starting to write, by stretching out their fingers. However, we also know that children generally learn better if they have a chance to take some exercise periodically. You might therefore consider encouraging the whole class to do a few star jumps or similar before settling down to work that involves writing.

Other remediation strategies include using paper with raised lines or wider lines, or thicker, shorter pencils or pencil grips. These will help students to form their letters correctly or more easily. This strays across into the category of 'accommodations' because it certainly makes things easier for children with dysgraphia. However, it may also help them to improve their skills because they can see how to form the letters. Having these options available may be helpful to many students, and not just those with dysgraphia, especially when you are teaching younger children.

It is also a good idea to encourage people with dysgraphia to write in cursive style, rather than trying to print. It seems to help the writing to flow better, and improves the spacing between letters and words.

You can also encourage all your students to brainstorm ideas before writing anything down. This is particularly helpful for students with dysgraphia, because they are often much better at organising their thoughts in speech than on paper. However, it will help everyone because they will avoid getting stuck on a single idea from the start.

Using outlines, plans and drafts will also improve the final piece of work. It is a good habit for anyone to get into. However, it may be particularly crucial for students with dysgraphia, to give them a chance to read and add more as they go. It is also good practice to help students to break tasks down into smaller steps. If possible, show them how each step contributes to the grade, so that they know how much effort they should be putting into each one.

Children with dysgraphia may also benefit from extra support in phonics and spelling from an early age.

Accommodation Strategies

Accommodation strategies are any that provide additional help or alternatives for particular students.

Letting them use a computer, rather than having to hand-write everything. It is also worth encouraging all your students to learn to touch-type, because this is likely to be a skill that is useful to them throughout their lives.
Providing or permitting an audio recorder to avoid them having to take detailed notes in lessons. This may require a reorganisation of the classroom to place a child within easy hearing distance of you with limited background noise.
Encouraging the use of speech-to-text software when they are preparing notes or assignments, especially when working at home.
Letting them go elsewhere to work to avoid distractions, but also to allow the use of speech-to-text software that may disrupt other children if used in the main classroom.
Providing handouts or summaries of each lesson to avoid them having to copy from the board, or prepare their own notes. This may be helpful to all children, especially if they can then supplement the handout with more notes.
Giving extra time to write assignments or notes, or to complete tests. This might mean giving longer notice of assignments than you would normally do.
Reducing writing requirements, for example, by providing tests or assignments with basic information such as name already completed, and using test formats that require less writing, such as 'ring the correct answer'.
Permitting alternatives to written assignments, such as an oral presentation or video.
Providing outlines and templates for all writing tasks, to give a clear starting point.
Providing children with a scribe or proofreader to check for errors. A scribe is particularly helpful because children with dysgraphia are often very capable of organising their thoughts in their heads, and in words—just not getting them down on paper. This approach can therefore allow their abilities to show, giving them much more confidence.

Modification Strategies

Modification strategies involve changing lessons or assessments to be more accessible to everyone in your classroom.

This may feel like harder work than simply accommodating one person. However, it is significantly more inclusive—and is the approach that many organisations like Guides and Scouts encourage to support children with disabilities in their units.

Examples of modification strategies include:

Giving students a research topic, and asking them to choose their own format for a report. You might offer them a selection, perhaps drawing a picture, creating a video, giving a presentation, writing a report or making something to show. However, you can also give them a completely free choice.
Explicitly grading solely on the content, and not the presentation. It is not unreasonable for teachers to want to encourage neat handwriting, especially at primary school. After all, examiners need to be able to read scripts. However, it puts many children with specific learning difficulties at a real disadvantage. They may be discouraged by the feeling that their knowledge never seems to be recognised. This approach gives a chance to turn that around.
Reducing the amount of written work that is required, for example, by asking children to work for a defined time, rather than 'until they have finished' a particular task, or written a certain number of words or pages.
Encouraging group work, and suggesting that students take on specific tasks within the group, depending on their skills and abilities, but sharing out the work evenly. You could identify the tasks for them at first, then gradually step back over time, and eventually let the groups decide and allocate tasks for themselves. This will allow students to take on tasks as they grow in confidence—and also give them valuable skills for the future.

A Final Thought

It is, of course, not solely the responsibility of teachers to help and support children with dysgraphia. There are many things that students themselves can do to develop their writing, or find 'workarounds' to problems.

However, they may need help to identify these.

Our page on Coping with Dysgraphia provides more information about some of these 'coping strategies', and it may be helpful to highlight some of them to students or learners.

Continue to:
Parenting Children with Dysgraphia
Teaching Skills