6 year old dyslexic

This was also the case for my dyslexic son.
He was diagnosed as mildly hypotonic as an infant. He could
not work a bottle, pacifier, eat babyfood and could only nurse.
We got therapy for him and when he ate his first solid food,
a McDonald’s french fry, without choking, we all cheered!

At home tricks we used:
pick-up sticks (usually works better with older children)
picking up marbles one a time and transferring them between hands,
picking up any collection of small objects - paperclips, baby dice, sunflower
seeds (in the shell), aquarium gravel, sea shells,
squeezing playdough, making playdough snakes and then lots of little snake eggs
stretching out Silly Putty

You could probably ask your OT and get all sorts of good suggestions.

Kathy

Learning issues sometimes occur in “clusters” and so problems with fine motor skills can present in children who have other issues as well.

OT is a great idea for your daughter. You could reinforce her OT with things like coloring with crayons, playing with playdough, cutting with scissors, making cookies with cookie cutters, and any kind of finger play including the wonderful “Eensie, Weensie Spider” song if she’ll still do that.

There are some pens and pencils that are easier to grip. Try the Ph.D pen or pencil but experiment with any of those interesting models of pencils you come across.

Don’t hesistate the ask the OT for suggestions as well.

Good luck.

An approach the OT may use for teaching how to tie shoelaces is called “reverse enchaining”. You could try it at home yourself. Basically, what you do is tie the laces except for the very last step — the child practices just that last step until it is learned well. Then you tie the laces except for the very last two steps, etc. By the time the child gets to the first step, the subsequent steps have been practiced many times. You would want to make some kind of a mat or board with half a dozen or a dozen shoelaces on it, so you could prepare 6 or more at a time for practice.

If weak hand strength is diagnosed by the OT, there is a neat therapy putty you can purchase. You can hide miniature dinosaurs in it, and the child has to twist and pull the putty to find them all. All kinds of clay are good for developing hand strength and coordination, but the putty is very clean.

Yet another exercise that is good for developing hand strength requires an old telephone book. The child crumples a single sheet of paper into a ball using only one hand. You start with maybe one or two pieces, and work up to 10 pieces per hand (one sheet at a time!), with the two hands each crumpling a sheet at the same time.

We got a very inexpensive rubber grip that slides onto a regular pencil. It is shaped for two different grips — right and left.

I would recommend Handwriting Without Tears very highly for teaching both printing and cursive. This approach was developed by an OT and is often used by OT’s. However, it’s very easy to use at home. Website is http://hwtears.com

Mary

Stephanie,
It is not uncommon for children with learning differences to show mild coordination difficulities that are fine and subtle. Some children display motor awkwardness, hand-eye coordination difficulities or delays in language development such as what you’ve mentioned. Each person with dyslexia is unique, having individual strengths and weaknesses. Of course, some of what you may have observed in your child could be a consequence of him/her being six-years-old and he/she may be maturing a little slower than some of the other children that you have observed. Regardless, its good that you are seeking professional help and starting to ask questions now.

There are many activities that you can do at home to stimulate your child and encourage his/her fine motor development. I do want to remind you to introduce activities in a natural way. Make them a part of a game or introduce them as a way to help mommy/daddy around the house. Your child will have questions about why he/she is going to see the new doctor and other things as they are introduced. Prepare a logical honest answer that will be consistently given by both you and the other adults in the family. When introducing a game or activity, be careful not to force the activity or select an activity that will be too difficult and hurt his/her confidence level. Also, don’t be surprised if your child begins to appear more emotional at this age. Six-year olds are often remembered for their moodiness and ever-changing friendships. They also tend to become more sensitive with regard to what they feel is criticism. Being six years old is tough. As each child gets more involved in school, he/she naturally begins to observe differences between himself/herself and his/her classmates. This is a good time to begin talking about how all of us have different gifts and to point out how you, dad, grandmother, etc. each does different things well and approaches tasks differently. Help your child think of things that he/she is good at.
Children with fine motor skill problems often have trouble dressing themselves, handling silverware, feeding themselves, using pencils and crayons. You can work with these weaknesses by introducing large colorful crayons and simple to color pictures. If you feel that the coloring book pictures might be too stressful for your child, then give him/her large sheets of paper and ask him/her to draw you a picture or make a collage to decorate your refridgerator door. Your child can use safety scizzors and cut bright pieces of paper out and glue them onto a larger sheet of plain paper. (You may need to help with the application of the glue.) He/she can use plastic stencils, templates, designs, or letters in the creation of his/her art work. If you use 11” by 12” sheets of blank paper, you can create a book in which your child may showcase his/her art.
Puzzles are also good manipulatives. Start simply with puzzles of no more than 5 to 10 pieces. The pieces should be of a medium to a large size so that they will be easier to handle, increasing your child’s chances of success. Work the puzzles together as a team to eliminate performance stress. Six-year-olds tend to like interacting with other people and hands-on materials. There are some nice floor puzzles on the market that are very simple where you put a 3-foot boy or girl together. I have seen these at local Wal-Marts. There are ABC puzzles, medium or large size Leggo pieces, Log Cabin pieces and beads that work well with fine motor development. Again, with all of these, you may need to initially assist your child pending his level of coordination and concentration. Avoid tiny beads and complicated projects that could add to his/her sense of failure and decrease his/her self-esteem. You could introduce a puzzle or Leggo set, by laying it out in view and pretending that it is something that you are interested in doing. If your child is hesitant to get involved, you could ask him/her to help you by handing you one piece at a time or by collecting the red Leggo pieces for you. Once you and he/she have completed a project, remember to leave it out on display for a day or two and complement the work. If he/she helped you in developing the composite, thank him/her for being such good partnerswith you.
Dolls such as Barbie, Ken, and G.I. Joe also utilize fine motor skills. There are clothes for Barbie that are from a collection called the “My First Dress” collection. They are made more simply for little hands and yet they don’t look regressive.
Play Dough is another good medium that you can work with. Your child can beat it, stretch it, use a rolling pin or can to flatten it. There are interesting Play Dough sets with special shape cutters that your child can manipulate and create all kinds of things from pizza to chocolate chip cookies.
There are also the old fashion paper and pencil connect the dots activities. For a six-year-old, you will probably want to limit the numbers to 10 or less pending his/her number knowledge and recognition.
Simple pre-school or kindergarten computer games can also help with fine motor control and eye-hand coordination by encouraging keyboard and mouse manipulation. There is even a tiny “mouse” made for children. There are several good computer games out such as Franklin Goes to School and Franklin’s Treasure Hunt Game produced by Briarpatch. These games do not require reading. They work on counting, sorting and identifying colors. Knowledge Adventure makes a series of computer games under the “Jump Start” label. They all sell for under twenty dollars. If your child likes dinosaurs, you might check out Knowledge Adventures’ “Dinosaur Adventure” game. You can find them at Toys R Us, Wal-Mart, and on the web through Toys R Us.com and Amazon.com. Amazon.com has the computer games rated and evaluated by previous customers as to appropriateness. These games report to be designed for children from 4 -7 years of age with different challenge levels available.
Another idea is to have your child turn the pages of simple age-appropriate books as you read to him/or her. If he/she finds listening to the reading a bit tiresome, then discuss the pictures with him/her. He/she can point to different objects or pictures on the page. The Caldecott Medal Books web site is one good place to start for excellent picture books. These are books that have received an award from the American Library Association for their illustrations. You can access a list of these books on the net at http://www.ala.org/alsc/caldecott.html. Two of this year’s winners were
“Olivia” by Ian Falconer and “Clack, Clack, Moo Cows That Type” illustrated by Betsy Lewin. Olivia is an inquistive, creative little piglet (dressed in bright red) who is “very good at wearing people out” with her big colorful dreams. My own daughter loved books by Eric Carle. He wrote a series of books with surprise endings using lights and sounds. Some of them were called “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” (He eats his way through the week and introduces the days of the week); “The Very Lonely Firefly”, who eventually finds lots of friends and “The Very Quiet Cricket” who when the time is right learns to make his own cricket sound. My daughter also loved Eggbert, the Slightly Cracked Egg. Eggbert is artistic and different from the other eggs. He becomes famous for his art and sends the other eggs personally designed postcards from exotic places. (By the way, the other, less creative eggs are still sitting in the fridge.) Lastly, “Rosie, the Cool Cat” is another favorite. Rosie is an orange tabby born in a family of black cats. Go figure. Her gifts and differences eventually lead her to success and recognition. Later, she has a litter of orange kittens with one black one in the bunch who is obviously different from her. More recent books include “The Meanest Thing To Say”, by Bill Cosby and “Pheobe’s Best Best Friend” by Barbara Roberts.
At last I leave you with ideas that you can involve your child in for no expense or little money. Your child can begin helping you set the table. Remember to use safe or plastic dishware so that you won’t care when/if he/she drops one. We paid our daughter a little something for the service. If you choose to do this, pay your child in coins. Use nickels, dimes, pennies and quarters. Set up a jar where he/she can watch the money grow. My child loves money. She constantly gets the money out, sorts it into piles and counts it. All of this is good exercise towards fine motor skill development. She never tires of examining and adding to her “treasure.”
You can also get your child to help you when you bake by allowing him/her to stir some of the batter or place the M & M’s on cookies after they are out of the oven. If you’re baking cupcakes, he/she can place the liners in the cupcake pans, etc. Also when you are preparing him/her food, cut the food into pieces or wedges. You can do this with apples, oranges, and sandwiches. Grapes can be washed, separated and placed in a bowl for your child to eat as “finger food.” Good luck and thanks for reading all of this! Connie

Stephanie,
After my last response to your question concerning the development of fine motor skills at home, I have continued to think about additional activities. One of the activities that I did with my daughter involved water play. It was so easy that I forgot to mention the activity. You can place your daughter in a small pool during the summer months or allow her to play a while each night when she takes her bath. Give her a number of small plastic containers like plastic measuring cups and measuring spoons of different sizes. Let her have fun filling the containers. I used to let my daughter take her Barbie dolls and other water-safe toys with her to the bathtub. We kept a plastic container by the bathtub that stored these items and every night when she would take her bath, she would literally dump all these manipulatives into the tub with her. She would dress and undress the dolls, wash their hair, pour water on them to rinse the soap off, etc. I also purchased puzzles that would stick on the side of the tub from a local educational store. She had one puzzle that was a map of the world. The pieces were rather large and brightly colored. We also collected the plastic action figures that came in the McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King “Happy Meals” bags. To this day, I have two huge(make that gigantic!) containers of these toys that used to fill her bathtub as she played out imaginary scenes with them. Some of them came apart and she would reassemble the tops of some characters onto the bottoms of other characters. This provided her with hours of fun and fine motor excercise.
I also thought of some other software companies that you might check-out. My perspective on this for young children leans towards providing practice with eye-hand coordination, fine motor development and increasing their self-esteem and confidence. With that said, I don’t worry so much about the level of the computer game as long as the child enjoys it and experiences success with it. There are numerous games by Disney. Broderbund is reliably noted for its good software programs. Broderbund has a Berenstain Bears and a Dr. Seuss’s series of computer software. No matter who makes the software, you will need to look at it and decide if its on-screen background is too busy for your child. Companies like Broderbund and the Children’s Television Network (Sesame Street) are typically noted for their quality products.
Best wishes. CW-R

Stephanie,
Dyslexia is a learning difference characterizing itself in language processing. This means that people with dyslexia have problems translating language into thaouths (as in listening or reading) or thoughts into language (as in writing or speaking). People with dyslexia does have a problem with writing however, not usually handwriting. People with dyslexia usually displays Dysphonetic dyslexia (errors such as ronaeg or orange and lghit for light these errors reflects deficit in sound symbol relationships); and/or Dyseidetic dyslexia (misspelling of words such as lisn for tisten and atenchen for attention, this is a inability to perceive and recall whole words).
Your child’s poor handwriting could be dysgrahpia which is a handwriting disability. Poor handwriting may be a manifestation of fine-motor difficulities because she is unable to execute efficiently the motor movement required to write. Also, fine motor difficulities does manifest itself by the inability to tie her shoes. Speak to your child’s teacher about your concern, she will be able to develop some strategies to help him improve his handwriting. If she is not too concern with it because of her age, then relax because fine motor skills usually does improve with age. However, if you can’t see a gradual improvement with time consult a physical therapist to help your child develope these fine motor skills.

Edna

Hi Stephanie,

Sounds like you got some great suggestions here! I’m just wondering if you are getting any help from the school for any of this? Is she already identified and getting help for the reading problem, for example? You didn’t mention it, and while the motor problems are important, there’s stuff you should be doing about the reading too, over the summer and as much as possible while she is still young. This is because the NIH studies (and many others) show that early intervention is usually much more effective than later attempts at remediation.

The other thought I had is that your daughter sounds like one little girl I worked with recently, starting in Kdgn she had trouble with writing and drawing, so that was the first thing that surfaced, but in first grade she began to have trouble with reading, and this was despite a quite high verbal IQ (129). Her parents took her for a neuropsych eval, which showed she had all the characteristics of NLD, non-verbal learning disorders, EXCEPT for the social piece, but that has developed as she got older. It’s been very interesting for me to watch (this little girl is the daughter of some family friends), because at one time dyslexia and phonological awareness problems were usually NOT thought to be part of the profile of an NLD child. I think many researchers are now starting to see that this is not necessarily true. So I’d keep an open mind and try to get her the best help you can as things surface… it is certainly great that you’re on top of this while she’s at an early age, her long term chances for a good outcome are better this way!

See my website, “Solving the Puzzle of Learning Disorders” at www.angelfire.com/on2/thepuzzle for more details!

Sharon