Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Maggie.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: And I'm Nicole. Welcome to the DIc Dyslexia and Coffee podcast. We are so happy you could join us. We are both moms and dyslexia interventionists who want to talk about our students and our children. What dyslexia is, how it affects our kids. Strategies to help and topics related to other learning disabilities will also be covered in this podcast.
Parents are not alone, and we want to give a voice to the concerns and struggles we are all having. This is a safe place to learn more about how to help our children grow and succeed in school and the world. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the conversation.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Welcome to DAc Dyslexia Coffee podcast. We're going to start with the concept of the week. Concept of the week is our opportunity as practitioners to kind of peel back the curtain a little bit and talk about things that we would be teaching in intervention. So last week we talked about what is a digraph? Two letters that make one sound. Today we're going to talk about a consonant blend. So, a consonant blend is when two or more consonants are next to each other, but they each make their own sound. For example, in the word stop, stood, s t is a blend. This is different from a digraph because a digraph cannot be separated.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: So today we're continuing our series on codiagnoses.
We spent the last couple episodes covering ADHD. This week we're discussing, sorry, dysgraphia and dyscunkulia.
We will give background information on both of these, as well as give some examples of supports that we can put in place on this episode. We will focus mostly on the academic supports again, and we will go into more home supports in a later episode.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Yes.
So, dysgraphia.
Dysgraphia is the condition of impaired letter writing by hand, that is, disabled handwriting. Impaired handwriting can interfere with learning to spell words in writing and the speed of writing text. Children with dysgraphia may have only impaired handwriting, only impaired spelling. So without the reading problems or both impaired handwriting and impaired spelling, dysgraphia may occur alone or with dyslexia. Dysgraphia can impact spelling legibility, word spacing, letter sizing, organization and expression.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: And this is the definition from the International Dyslexia association for Dysgraphia.
And obviously, dysgraphia can impact all areas of academics because writing is required in all subjects. Also, this impacts writing in different ways. It depends on what the student is struggling with and how we can help them.
I would say it overlaps with dyslexia way more than the statistics say, wouldn't you?
[00:03:28] Speaker A: A thousand percent, yeah.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: Almost all of our students come with either the spelling, the legibility, the organization piece, anything to do with writing. It's just more challenging.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Those persist and persistent reversals, that is.
Yes.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: And sometimes these students need to have interventions, accommodations, or assisted technology in order to succeed in school.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: So some of the interventions for dysgraphia, occupational therapy for letter formation, visual motor coordination and fine motor coordination, this kind of intervention can help that. Explicit instruction in letter formation, writing, organization, how to use a graphic organizer, explicit keyboarding instruction also is key for these.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: Students because at some point you might switch from the actual explicit instruction in handwriting to do the keyboarding in order to keep up with peers.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
Nicole, being an OT background, can you say more on that piece of what are those underlining skills that a student who's really struggling with this dysgraphia, what are those underlining skills that someone like an occupational therapist would be really targeting in intervention?
[00:05:12] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. That letter formation, if you don't have letter formation properly, it takes longer to write them. It's more of a struggle. So think about if you're taking notes from a board, if you're doing all your letters backwards or in a different way, it's going to take you longer to copy from the board and you might not keep up with the class.
Another thing, the fine motor coordination, that means those little muscles in your fingers that really need to be. I'm particular about picking up little things or like tying shoes is an example of a fine motor coordination task. You have to really kind of put that together.
Those type of activities, being able to trace on something or color in the lines. For little kids, those are all fine motor coordination tasks that build those skills and help with writing going forward.
And then you get to the older students where it's more the organization piece of how to write a paragraph and use the graphic organizer to kind of help with those type of things. But then there's also different tools that we use as occupational therapists, like pencil grips and stuff that we will talk about in a little bit that can also help hold, hold your fingers in the correct formation so that you can hold the pencil correctly.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's really helpful. Yeah. So some accommodations that would be associated with dysgraphia, being able to type answers on tests or assignments. Here again, that's why it's so key that we've explicitly taught students keyboarding skills.
If we're writing, that is in as an accommodation and a student is not a proficient typist. That's not a very good accommodation, then.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: I don't think they use the boards over your fingers anymore.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: It's like when I learned typing in.
[00:07:15] Speaker B: School and, you know, they do not.
[00:07:18] Speaker A: I'm actually kind of concerned at the state of keyboarding instruction in schools right.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Now, considering all of our students have chromebooks.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Right. That would be.
We would expect them to be able to keyboard and many of my students cannot.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: No.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: A lot of my students say they haven't learned it at school at all.
[00:07:47] Speaker A: Yeah. That is the same reporting I am getting from my students. And stay tuned because definitely haven't been taught that at school yet.
Another one. Another accommodation, though, is using a dictionary for tests that are not specifically spelling tests. Right. So being able to look up a word or even having a word bank if it's like a history test. Right. And they're being expected to spell words that relate to a specific topic, topic, having those words available for them, if that's not really what we're testing, allow them to use that as a resource.
Again, speech to text technology, that is another one that seems like a really easy peasy accommodation. Right? Like, oh, okay, just let them speak into their computers and it will type that for them. That is a great accommodation, and I am an advocate for that accommodation. However, the missing piece there often is the. Is the education that goes along with that. You have to teach a student how to use that. The technology needs a little bit of time to learn their voice and the way they speak. And you also have to look back over that block of spoken text that is now in print for any mistakes or, you know, sometimes mispronunciations. Right. They make that then into the text. And so you really have to be careful for that one. Sometimes that really requires a staff member to help a student coach them a lot on. Okay, but how do we use that? That is going to save them a lot of time and agony in the long run, but it really requires a lot of teaching on the front end. Sometimes that's kind of skipped, getting notes from a teacher or peers. So, like Nicole said earlier, if we're expecting students to be taking notes from a board and all that student is concentrating on is letter formation, it's going to take so much longer.
Often I'm still wanting a student with dyslexia or dysgraphia, rather to be taking those notes or at least trying that for the mere fact that we do know that if we're writing something down, it is helping our brain somewhat retain information, but what I don't want that is interfering with the students be able to study from those notes often. It's kind of like, well, the same studies are kind of drawing on students who doodle also do well. So it's kind of like that mere fact of we're using more than one sense at the same time. That seems to be what has the strongest research behind that. And so I'm still wanting them to go through the exercise, but I don't want that to interfere with their ability to study or read their own notes.
Being able to give oral answers for a test. If you're not testing paragraph structure. Right. If you're not text testing those writing skills directly, allowing a student to give an oral answer, it's going to do two things. Student is going to be able to give a better answer and it's going to, you know, it's going to weed out that kind of thing where it's like, well, we're not really testing that in the first place. And sometimes these students with the severe dysgraphia, a teacher's going to struggle so much to read what that student has tried to write that is kind of taking care of two of those things at the same time.
Yeah. Demonstrating answers in a different way in general.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: Right.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: And our good old friend extended time.
We all know how I feel about that by now.
Very, very important.
Not the only accommodation available, but still very important.
[00:12:17] Speaker B: And still they need to be taught how to use their extended time explicitly.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: The other thing for handwriting or writing in general is assisted technology. So we already talked a little bit about speech to text, but there is also adaptive paper, some with raised lines, some with different colors, help students be on the right place in the page to get started.
There's adaptive pens and pencils for pencil grips.
A slant board helps some students.
They need their paper kind of raised up so that they can see it in a different way. And it just makes it a lot easier. It positions the wrist a little bit better and it just helps them with letter formation and legibility.
So there's something called co writer AI and it understands what you're writing and will give you options for continuing the sentence. So this is kind of a new AI accommodation that uses assistive technology to help so they can pick what's next instead of coming up with the idea on their own. Pretty much, yeah.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: That one, I think is going to be an interesting one to follow. These kind of dysgraphia accommodations, I think will be a very interesting thing to follow. In the next few years, this is one I've seen kind of explode.
I would say when I was teaching, even twelve years ago, first of all, dysgraphia was kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. They might have dysgraphia, right? I would not say, I would say I came across that often. Like, it was written that it was one of my students areas of disability, but it was not emphasized as kind of a real area where they really might struggle, which, yeah, I think we missed the boat a little, that one. It really is affecting everywhere.
And even that use of AI, even in my own experiments, just kind of writing for writing emails, writing reports, all those kind of things, I think that has come a really long way. And I really wonder all the ways that that's going to affect what we would call accommodations in schools moving forward.
[00:15:06] Speaker B: I would agree. And the other thing that we sometimes do too, is a seating change.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: Sometimes, obviously, you need your whole core, your trunk, everything needs to be in alignment to be able to be in the right position for writing. And sometimes just changing the seat will help a student be able to write more legible. So that's another environmental modification you can also make.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: You know, and I don't think we touched on this one here, but as far as writing the organization pieces, those graphic organizers are very key here yet again. Yes, we have to explicitly teach them.
But even instructing a student how to use an outline or how to make an outline, that can be quite huge for a student with dysgraphia. Being able to learn how to jot down an idea and then expand upon it later, like, okay, let's get something on the page now. We can expand on this idea later. That is where something like AI can come in. Something like cold I writer something like, really? Any of those. I mean, even just the baked in the cake kind of things, like Google's got the Gemini or whatever, whatever it's called, you know.
Right. If it has something to go on, we're at a more advantageous spot then we were before.
[00:16:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think the other thing that I noticed with my students with dysgraphia is grammar is so hard for them.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: It's.
And it's beyond just forgetting where to put a comma every once in a while. Like, yes, that's, their sentences may never have a capitalization or never have a period unless you practice with them on where they need to go, why they need to be there, and explicitly teach all those concepts to them in a way that they can look back and maybe review what they did proofread themselves. So this is all part of things.
[00:17:30] Speaker A: That you wouldn't just teaching. Every sentence has to have a verb.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: You know, sometimes when I'm working with a student, right. I kind of give them, like, listen, if you remember zero other things that I have ever taught you, please remember these five. Okay. And this is one. Like, every sentence has to have a verb. If there is no action or state of being in that sentence, it is not a sentence. It's just words being able to tell the difference between what is a noun and a verb.
That is a real area of struggle for a lot of our students with dysgraphia, being able to write even simple sentences, very, very difficult.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: And typically, I also notice that they miss words.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: In the sentence. So then the sentence doesn't quite make sense. You know, what they wanted to put there just because, you know, as an adult having that in your brain. But, yeah. So, I mean, being explicitly taught those things are, it's just so important for.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: These students, for sure, because even when it comes to using things like spell check. Right. So spell check is only going to be as good as its users ability to at least get the first sound and the first vowel sound.
Correct.
We can do a lot in terms of accommodations and tools for these students, but that's where that underpinning teaching point comes in. If we're not teaching them at least that much, they're not going to catch it. Spell checks not going to catch it.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: And then no such word comes up.
[00:19:32] Speaker A: Right. Or. Yeah, no such word exists. Or they're going to pick a word that is close but not right. Quite right.
[00:19:43] Speaker B: Doesn't make sense in the sentence. Yes, but it looks right.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: But it looks right. So we're just going to go for it. Yeah.
Teaching those basic, basic grammar things is the same way because the AI is not going to understand dog run, go under log. Like, what are you talking about? It's not going to have enough to generate a cohesive sentence that makes sense.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:20:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: So basically what we're saying is any of these supports that you give a student, it really needs to be taught how to use them explicitly in a way that the student can use them successfully.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: It's dyscalculia time.
[00:20:29] Speaker A: All right. Dyscalculia.
I am going to struggle to say this correctly. I'm just going to apologize to our listeners right now.
Why would we name it dyscalculia? I know why, but, man, that's hard to say. And our poor kids who have it.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: They can't say it.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: They can't say it. These poor guys. Oh, my gosh. So dyscalculia is alerting disorder that affects a person's ability to do math. Much like dyslexia, it disrupts the areas of the brain related to reading. So dyscalculia affects the brain areas that handle math. Right. So a number related skills, those basic understandings of math, like the rules of math, number sense, those kinds of things. Symptoms of this condition usually appear in childhood, but adults may have dyscalculia without knowing it.
This one gets missed often.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: Yeah. So in terms of intervention, our interventions for dyscalculia are going to mirror our interventions related to reading. So related to dyslexia.
So starts with explicit instruction on basic number sense and mathematical concepts. This instruction should be systematic and multisensory.
This is something that we also offer at our center, at dyslexia Achievement center, we have interventionists that are trained in this kind of math instruction. So if you are a listener who is local, if you live here in Wisconsin and this is a problem that you're seeing with your kid, we do have services here to help some accommodations that are related to dyscalculia.
This can include using math facts when taking a test.
If we're testing something like a bigger concept, right. But we need those basic math facts to support that.
Having those mass facts available for the student, that can be tremendously helpful. Use of manipulatives, that can be extremely helpful. That pulls in that multi sensory dynamic. Using a calculator on test, if you're not specifically measuring just those basic, basic facts, having that calculator as that support, even as a good double check, can be extremely important for these students.
Having tests and assignments read to the student, why is this with dyscalculia? You say, why? Why?
Right. It's because of how much overlap there is with that dyslexia and dyscalculia. Also the ability for a student with dyscalculia to recognize numbers that can be tremendously impaired. So if you have a student who consistently maxes up six and nine and they're just off on their own taking that test, guess what? They're going to miss those. So having those tests out loud can be tremendously helpful for those students, again, being able to give oral answers.
If you have a student with, let's say, dysgraphia and dyscalculia, right. If you're making them write down these sixes and nines and I mean, oh, my gosh eights and sixes.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: And you see fours a lot backwards.
[00:24:38] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: Twos, threes. Yeah, yeah.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: You know, and even spacing, I see this problematic spacing with numbers. Right. So if the number is 1000 and something, I've seen like a one way over to the left and then kind of a group, maybe of three numbers somewhere else kind of on the page, and they're not recognizing that as a bigger number.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: The other things they do, too is, like, for higher numbers, sometimes they push them together so there's no spaces.
[00:25:16] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: So then it looks like this huge number instead of maybe it's supposed to be 1112 and 13.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: And now they have a huge number and they're like, what am I supposed to do with that number again?
[00:25:29] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: And then it kind of blends together and it's hard to separate it then.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.
And our good old pal, extended time, I feel like we just throw that in there, by the way, as a gentle reminder, we need extended time.
[00:25:51] Speaker B: So there is some assisted technology for math, of course.
So we found something called math talk, which is a speech recognition sophomore design for students with ADHD and physical disabilities that make it so they don't use the keyboard, so they are just speaking the numbers. It's an add on to dragon, which is a software that comprehends technical vocabulary and transcribes in a mathematical notation. And it could be appropriate for trigonometry, algebra, calculus, and even PhD level courses. And you know some stuff about dragon, right?
[00:26:34] Speaker A: Yeah. So Dragon is a piece of assistive technology that really came out of the visually impaired, really came out in the early, early days of screen readers. And so dragon speak was kind of its original adaptation.
[00:26:56] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:26:57] Speaker A: And so it really came out of the days of low vision and blind students, screen readers, and also speech to text capabilities.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: Another eddied man.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: Another. Right, exactly. All right. About time, dragon. About time.
Thanks a lot. Where were you in college now?
[00:27:23] Speaker B: So, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia are so intertwined that sometimes it is really hard to separate what the students needs are. A lot of the suggestions we have given you today overlap because these three diagnoses overlap so much with each other. A lot of our students have more than one diagnosis when they come to our center.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: Yeah. So if you were hearing these accommodations and you were like, man, I feel like I have heard these before.
You're not crazy.
You're not crazy. It's true.
You know, I really strongly believe, based on what I see, that the overlaps between dyslexia dysgraphia, and dyscalculia, they are way more than the statistics say they are.
I was looking up some information in preparation for this episode, and according to the Cleveland Clinic, dyscalculia affects between three and 7% of the population. They categorize this as rare.
And at our center, we find that more often than not, our students have more than one of these disorders.
And we explicitly teach everything.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, pulling.
Pulling these disorders apart.
[00:28:53] Speaker B: Is very difficult.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: Is very difficult. And almost to the point where myself as a practitioner. Right. What do I need to know about a student to work with them?
I do want to know their diagnosis.
It does help put into context, okay, what could be going on?
What is going to be my starting point in terms of accommodations, where, what might I structure a lesson to look like based on that knowledge?
However, that diagnosis does not tell me any. Everything I need to know. And so often, if a student has dyslexia, they are going to struggle with writing or with math at some point. So whether or not it rises to the level where we say dysgraphia, dyscalhelia, and dyslexia, it's still going to affect them in all of those areas, if really think about it. Right. Math is a language. Mm hmm.
[00:30:06] Speaker B: Right. And the way we teach math depends on, like, cracking the code.
[00:30:09] Speaker A: Right, exactly.
[00:30:10] Speaker B: So because we both use letters and numbers to represent the mathematical concepts.
And math often has word problems, which includes reading, which is dyslexia.
[00:30:25] Speaker A: Right. Handwriting, which is dysgraphia.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: In order to solve the problem, a student might not only have to comprehend it, but synthesize the information in print.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: Also, which is a way higher order skill and related to executive functioning, which.
[00:30:41] Speaker B: We'Ve said our students with dyslexia are impacted to struggle with.
[00:30:48] Speaker A: When it comes to dysgraphia, it is even more difficult to pull that one.
[00:30:54] Speaker B: Apart from dyslexia, because there's a definition. Part of the definition of dyslexia is a writing component.
[00:31:02] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:31:02] Speaker B: Also. So that makes it, I think, confusing.
[00:31:06] Speaker A: It does.
[00:31:07] Speaker B: It does.
[00:31:07] Speaker A: And I think it puts.
I think it puts parents at a real struggle point where it's like, okay, what is the value of seeking all three of these diagnoses?
That has to be a familial decision. Right? I mean, that decision lies in the hands of the family, in my opinion.
I really strongly feel that if we have that dyslexia diagnosis, I, as a practitioner, am knowledgeable enough to say this is going to impact more than one of these areas. Definitely.
You know, the other piece in regards of dysgraphia, if we really need to think about reading and writing, they're what we call reciprocal processes. So that means for every single reading task, there is a matching writing or spelling task. So a good example. Right? We talked about decoding. So decoding is reading a word on a page.
[00:32:17] Speaker B: Right.
[00:32:17] Speaker A: Right. Being able to recognize a word, put it into parts, read the word, and then the opposite of that is encoding. That's that spelling piece.
So it's complicated, but not. Right. It's complicated, but not many of the accommodations that can be provided for a student with dyslexia, they're going to be the same as the accommodations that we would be putting in place for dysgraphia and dyscalculia.
And so really on the parent side of things, it's being able to advocate for those accommodations when someone might come say, huh, that's interesting. Why is this person with dyslexia getting these accommodations in math?
That's a really uneducated question. First of all, if you're getting that from a school, I'm concerned, and the reason is because it's integrated, so it's important.
So we like to end our episodes with what's going on in our life outside of dyslexia.
You know, this week, I don't. I don't know.
I don't know.
This week, I think I'm struggling to understand what day it is, what month it is.
I'm feeling all the eos this week. Like, I don't know. I think I have it all.
I don't know. We are just kind of fully into start of school craziness.
My son has decided that he will be joining the Cub Scouts, which I'm really excited for him, that scouting was something I did as a kid, so I'm excited for him. But that is coming with its own, like, oh, God. Now we have many more things to add to our already disorganized situation.
[00:34:25] Speaker B: For me this week, just going to relate it to our topic. Our two children that have a diagnosis of dyslexia also have dysgraphia.
Handwriting has always been a struggle in our house.
As an occupational therapist myself, obviously, we've done lots of intervention, and now we're kind of at a point where they're both older now and we want them to keep up with their peers. And so we're working on typing with them instead.
And we're to the point of accommodation and assistance technology instead of intervention. And you kind of get to that point I think in the older grades. Now that my son's in third grade and having to keep up with the rest of the, you know, peers, it's just. It's difficult to keep doing the intervention when you know that typing would be just so much more fluid for him.
[00:35:22] Speaker A: You have to switch to a functional mindset.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:35:27] Speaker A: You have to think, what is going to work?
What is this kid really going to need? And I think the intervention piece then becomes the education about the assistance.
[00:35:37] Speaker B: Correct. Like, we're doing intervention for. He's learning how to do typing.
[00:35:44] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:35:44] Speaker B: And then when is it appropriate to use?
[00:35:49] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that, and thank you all for listening and joining us for DAC, dyslexia and coffee. Please follow us on social media and reach out if you have any questions or would like us to discuss a topic. If you like our show, be sure to follow and rate our show on your podcast. Players. This is how we reach more listeners, and that's how we're able to help more families. Thanks for listening.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: Thank you.
