How can it be???

[bugsmom]

How can it be that my little ADDer, who takes ten minutes to right a correct sentence on a piece of paper, can text me three sentences in the matter of seconds?

Josh is on a fishing trip with the men this weekend and he's been texting me off and on all day. He typed out a long text to me in a matter of seconds. I kid you not. I even asked him if he was doing the texting, because I couldn't believe it was him. Not only that, he spelled everything correctly! I am not kidding when I say I have to correct all his essays...nothing is spelled right and he uses the wrong punctuation.

Just makes you wonder....

[charliegirl]

This is probably more than you ever wanted to know but it explains why its easier to text or type than it is to write for many of our children.

My son's 3rd grade teacher started letting him do reports and writing projects on the computer and e-mailing them to her. It made a world of difference. He didn't have all the graphomoter complexities to deal with so he could put more of his mind into what he wanted to say and how he was saying it.


www.allkindsofminds.org/researchArticles.aspx?topicid=22&constructid=6


Relationship between automaticity in handwriting and student's ability to generate written text
Jones, D., & Christensen, C. A. (1999). Relationship between automaticity in handwriting and student’s ability to generate written text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(1), 44-49.
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SUMMARY:
The ability to generate written text requires the coordination of a large number of both cognitive and motor skills. Students must be able to generate ideas and then translate that idea into written words, and then perform the movements while starting the entire process all over again. When thinking of possible causes for the inability to generate written text, most people would not consider the impact of motor skills to be of any importance, but the mechanical demands of writing have been hypothesized to interfere with the higher order cognitive process of composing text and the language-specific processes that come with it. Studies done in the last 2 decades have strongly supported this hypothesis by showing mechanical interference in the cognitive processes of planning, memory, and organization necessary for the composition of written text. Their findings suggest a strong relationship between composition skill and the finger movements, rapid, automatic production of the alphabet, and rapid coding of orthographic information necessary for composing text. The authors report two studies that investigate the relationship between handwriting and orthographic-motor integration in the context of creating well-structured written text. The authors correctly hypothesized that lack of automatic orthographic-motor integration is a significant factor in children’s ability to generate written text.

[lcdc1]

well now I could go on and on about Ran and texting! Geeeze! It is just something they do, in the sense of that type of stuff, Ran can be a techno geek even though she would never admit it! It always amazes me that she can struggle with some school and LD stuff, but there is not gap in the texting and computer skills and attention to that stuff.

[misty]

My daughter too! I saw her the other day IMing with her friend & she was typing fast! they have keyboarding class in school & she always gets A's. Remember, our kids have had computers, keyboards, etc since pre-school. Not like us...I remember having 1 year of computer class --in high school! Shannon writes very well now, but its still in her IEP that she can type assignments rather than write them out.

[mom33]

How is it that my son 15 can't follow simple instructions but can do so well in school on many subjects. I don;t know how to really help him. Neuropyschologist we have is far away and wants us to set up sessions at her office. Too far, Too expensive, Too much time traveling. Need a good mentor! Not sure I'm that happy with concerta his grades went way up but is he happy. The 5PM-8PM time period at our house is hell. He refuses to take supplement in afternoon to help. He would like to get off concerta but we've been that route before. It is hard to cope with ADHD. Can't wait for the summer.

[charliegirl]

Mom33, have you tried other meds? There are a few now which last longer than Concerta for most people.

[lcdc1]

mom33. I am an adult that takes concerta each day and was having the same issues you described with your son of the 5-9pm problems. I finally went to see a great ADHD physcologist that convinced me to try an evening dose of ritalin and amazingly it has helped overall (I am still working with him though to learn some other stuff). I do well at work, but was messing up the home life and juggling all that stuff that was causing stress which was compounding my ADHD symptoms. The ritalin also helps me to get to sleep and I am back on a pretty much normal sleep cycle except when the stressful things hit me like 6 at a time! Good luck.

[jill]

It is plain and simple it is something of interest to him when school work is not. Same for my girl she will write things down she is interested in and do a good job but for school work sloppy for she does not care. Besides typing and texing is more fun.

[anon4now]

My son just loooooves cursive writing. I don't get it, but he sat down and wrote the most organized list of things to do in cursive. I've never seen it like that.

He likes typing too. He likes spell check the most. He can't stand the squiggly red line under the word, he has to change it right then and there. I always worry he'll forget what he was typing because he worries about the spelling, but he seems to do ok.

As far as texting...sometimes you only have to write the first 3-4 letters in the word, then push next and it finds the common words for you. I text pretty fast. Maybe because the texting just gets their word on the screen a lot faster then hand writing or typing the whole word out. <shrug> My DH and I text. We even have our texting language. If you type Woohoo, it comes out Zonino. So that's what we text now instead of woohoo.

Anon

[rakuflames]

Feb 15, 2008 22:04:46 GMT -5 bugsmom said:

How can it be that my little ADDer, who takes ten minutes to right a correct sentence on a piece of paper, can text me three sentences in the matter of seconds?

Josh is on a fishing trip with the men this weekend and he's been texting me off and on all day. He typed out a long text to me in a matter of seconds. I kid you not. I even asked him if he was doing the texting, because I couldn't believe it was him. Not only that, he spelled everything correctly! I am not kidding when I say I have to correct all his essays...nothing is spelled right and he uses the wrong punctuation.

Just makes you wonder....

To the brain, writing with a keyboard is entirely different than writing with pencil and paper. This is why a keyboard is a primary intervention for students with dysgraphia.

You should know that dysgraphia is dramatically common in children with AD/HD. There are a variety of reasons, but it actually takes tremendous brain organization to write, and for some children, the effort taken to put the marks on the paper floods the brain and makes it very hard to think. To the brain the keyboard is different ... and doesn't flood the brain.