The old adage that "at school you will be taught to read and write" is a thing of the past long ago. Today's schools require a sufficiently high level of preparation from a child - both mental, psychological and physical. And of course, even before school, the child must learn to read and write. But already at this stage, difficulties sometimes arise associated with such a violation as dysgraphia.
What is dysgraphia and how to identify it
It is often difficult for parents to believe that a child really cannot spell words correctly. In general, many parents take an extremely strange position in relation to their child. When a child asks for help and says that he is not coping, they answer: “I studied at school a long time ago, I don’t remember anything” and at best they hire a tutor for him, and at worst they simply ignore the problem. On the other hand, they reproach the child with the fact that “it’s a shame not to know your own native language!”. But difficulties can indeed arise.
If, despite his diligence and doing all the homework, the child is not able to write correctly, confuses letters, syllables, words, does not know how to correctly construct a sentence, does not distinguish between linguistic concepts, then most likely he suffers from dysgraphia.
Dysgraphia is a person's inability to master the skills of literate writing. Most often it is paired with dyslexia - the inability to read, but in some cases, these disorders can be observed separately.
Dysgraphia is not a disease, but it can cause many problems not only in school, but also in life.
For some reason, speech therapists and psychologists often pay attention only to phonetic dysgraphia, that is, errors associated with nondiscrimination of phonemes and incorrect correlation of sound and the letter denoting it. However, there are several types of dysgraphia errors.
1. Errors associated with the lack of formation of phonemic processes and auditory perception - these are the most common errors. That is, if a child writes the word "smoke" instead of the word "house", if he constantly skips letters ("tareka"), if he mixes up the syllables and letters ("onko" instead of "window"), if he adds extra syllables to the word or releases necessary, distorts words, gets confused in softening vowels, these are errors associated with auditory perception.
2. Errors associated with poor formation of the lexical and grammatical structure of the language: the child does not correctly agree with each other words ("beautiful girl"), incorrectly establishes controls between words ("go to the street" instead of "go to the street"), replaces words with similar, confuses prefixes and prepositions, skips words in a sentence.
3. The third type of errors is errors associated with visual recognition of letters. The child confuses similar letters - "b" and "b", "w" and "u", writes the letters in a mirror image (especially when he begins to write in capital letters), etc.
When, how and where to start
Many articles and books have been written about how to deal with dysgraphia, but almost all of them, for some reason, touch on a rather narrow range of problems. For example, most of them are aimed at correcting dysgraphia among schoolchildren and preschoolers. You can find a lot of similar techniques and albums with assignments. But it happens that parents decide to deal with the problem quite late, for example, when the child is already in the third or fourth grade. And here the task is complicated by the fact that for several years the child in the classroom has already managed to give a lot of linguistic concepts and definitions from different branches of linguistics, and he gets confused and "floats" in them. It is especially difficult for children who, suffering from dysgraphia, study according to educational programs of increased complexity, for example, according to the Elkonin-Davydov program. Often, problems with the Russian language are written off as laziness, both teachers and parents put pressure on the child, as a result, the child may even have a complete rejection of this subject, and he will never learn to write correctly.
So what if you notice signs of dysgraphia or dyslexia in your child?
1. Be considerate of your child. If he has a delay in speech development, if he pronounces sounds poorly, if he just starts to read and write, but can no longer cope, be sure to contact a speech therapist and psychologist for advice. Better to solve these problems before school. At home, you can study with your child using special albums with interesting tasks that are easy to find on sale.
2. If a child has just started school, and you see that he objectively does not cope with the Russian language program, if he is not given home and class assignments, also immediately contact a speech therapist and psychologist. By the way, find out from other parents how well the Russian language is given to the child's classmates - if everyone has problems, most likely, the matter is not in developmental disorders, but in the teacher.
4. If you decide to deal with the problem when the child is already in the third or fourth grade or later, then it will be much more difficult for you. To begin with, enlist the support and consent of the child - he himself must realize that he has problems, but if you fight them, then he will succeed. Very often, children are mistaken simply because they are afraid to make a mistake, they consider themselves unable to do the right thing - a psychologist and a sensitive attitude of parents will help here.
You can try hiring a tutor, but try to find someone who already has experience working with these children, or someone who is ready to move away from their traditional program and devote a little more time to working with your child. Since the child, most likely, has a complete mess of concepts and terms in his head, he cannot distinguish parts of speech from members of a sentence, phonemes from sounds, and sounds from letters, he will have to work on the systemic nature of the language. Work with your teacher or tutor to create a convenient workflow, such as the one shown in the picture. Work through each section of the language separately and show your child how they relate to each other. Make sure your child reads more and then retells the text to you. And most importantly, do not forget to explain to the teacher that the child has problems that he cannot cope with on his own, so for some time you should not ask as much from him as from others.
Be consistent and persistent in the fight against dysgraphia, enlist the support of specialists, study special literature - and the results will not be long in coming.
