Messy writting, Tying shoes

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WOW! It's okay if my son does not have Perfect writting...I would settle for legible!

wow, I'm really not alone! The lousy handwiting and laces have been plaging this house for years, but with the help of computers and slip ons, life is improving!

The trick to tying shoes and hand writing is finger control. Remember, we Aspies have trouble with fine motor skills and our hands don't always do what we tell them to. 2 things greatly improved my handwriting (and shoe tying for that matter).

1) Finger exercises. Touch your thumb to each finger in succession, see how fast you can do it. Its fun just to watch my hand work. Another is to hold your hand up with all fingers extended and then try to move only one at a time.

2) Practice forgery. Not in the illegal sense, but work on copying others hand writing and even type written letters. This gets you to look at exactly how the letters are made. I stole my particular printed font from a girl I knew in high school. I liked the way her letters looked and I thought it would be funny to pass her a note in her own handwriting. I did a little too good of a job and creeped her out, but to this day I get compliments on my penmanship.

WOW THANKS FOR THE TIPS!! I will definately implement them!

I am luck I haven't.

We worked it out with the Principal that my son could take a mini lap top to school with him and do his school work (writing) on that. He is also supposed to type in his assignments for school. We havent tried it yet because the meeting was in the last weeks of school so Im hoping it works out. As for the shoes, my son (11) likes shoes without laces.... easy answer!

my sons mouth is a mess. we must brush his teeth for him because he does not have the fine motor skills to do it properly. my mother in law is a dental hygenist so we get all sorts of advice.. some we like and others we just take it in and SMILE!

If I am not mistaken bad handwriting is a Aspergers trait. I have dealt with this often in my sons school and tried to get thru to the teachers that its not him being lazy as they say but its part of Aspergers.. I found some info on a webiste and it listed the handwriting as a classic sign of Aspergers.
I have tried and tried to tell the teacher that it does hurt his hand to write.. they had him tested for occupational therapy services and they turned him down. I hit the roof.. Stop complaining to me that he can't print, and still writes his letters backwards in school if the school is not willing to give him services to aid these issues. I try to work with him at home as my husband does also but we are lucky if we can get thru the homework most of the time. his brain is on overload from ALL the stimulation in school that when we get him after school he can just about do the homework they give him. when he learns the keyboard better then hopefully he will be able to get the routine down to do it on the computer.. you have to wonder what a public school as large as the one we are in does not understand simple basic things that relate to aspergers.. you want him to clean up the handwriting and stop writing his letters and numbers backwards then get him the services he needs.. I understand we all have jobs as parents BUT we don't have degrees is elemantary education. and when we send our children to school we expect for them to get the help they need to LEARN! they spend more time (money) fighting the services to not to offer kids than they do getting the help they need.

as for the shoe laces Ryan does have a hard time with this.. but I have always blamed that on his sensory issues. he leaves his laces loose because he can not stand the feel of anything tight on him. he hates socks with seams so we must turn them inside out.. but he just slips his shoes on..

he learned how to ride his bike at 5 years old.. he just put his mind to it.. sports in genearl I never push him to be part of.. and My mom thinks different.. she pushed me and I hated it because I could not follow as others did.. and when I was cut from a team time and time again she just found another one for me to join. I resented her for this.. she used to ask why I was not like my cousins.. because I had bad motor control and I could not follow what I was supposed to do. it was horrible for me.. so I will never make my son do things that make him feel out of place just to make myself fit in with others and to force him to "have friends" as she wanted me to and now wants Ryan too...

Hello all, havent seen any mums of girls writing in so I thought I'd say that my 8yo girl has had a few unsympathetic teachers where handwriting is concerned - they seem to be teaching or expecting calligraphy from their year one students! My girl consequently, (now in year 3) loathes writing with a passion I've never heard of yet! I do hope someone else out their can tell me she's not the only one.

She is very articulate but when it comes to writing compositions at school, she limits them to the shortest sentences possible, and the writing is tragically ill formed. She wont accelerate her progress with spelling (despite reading proficiently - all the Harry Potters, the Narnias, the Animorphs books) because she doesnt want to move up and have to write longer words! It worries me because her grades are falling and I know she is capable of so much more than she chooses to demonstrate at school. She is constantly kept in at lunch or recess to finish written work so that reinforces her desire to write as messily and as little as possible.

My only hope for her english studies is that she is interested in learning to type. I hope that when she gets through her typing skill development, she can be released from the prison which is the scurge of handwriting. Then all the books she as dictated to me and new stories in her head can hopefully be freed!

As for shoe laces, she has finally mastered it, but I dont fret as she has lots of school mates that aren't much better with laces (or maybe they think it fashionable to have un-laced shoes).

my 7 year old daughter ,who's going for dx this week, spent all of last year getting ragged on by her teacher about her handwriting. her writing is atrocious. 90% of her papers came home with notes from the teacher begging her to take more time, write neater etc...my daughter *is* capable of writing neat, but it takes her an inordinate amount of time and concentration to do so. she loves to write stories, but who could read her writing ???? she also has problems reversing letters and leaving some letters out altogether.
she absolutely HATES riding her bike ( falls over all of the time)and tying her shoes ( she's asked for her next pair of sneakers to be velcro).....she won't wear anything that has buttons because she struggles with the buttons.the only zippers she'll use are the ones on her jackets.

This was a good description of me as a child.

I had horrible handwriting. I never really mastered cursive, and in first grade, I regularly got Cs and Ds on my handwriting assignments when I got As in just about everything else I tried. Around 4th grade I went to a private school, and my teacher let me do my assignments on the computer. By the time I got into middle school (7th grade for me, I spent 6th in the private school), all the big assignments were supposed to be typed, and my handwriting ceased to be a problem. It eventually got better, but I still have my hands cramp badly when I write, especially if I try to write cursive.

When it came to bikes, I wouldn't let my parents take the training wheels off my bike. They'd ask me if it didn't embarass me that all my friends could ride bikes without them, but no, it never bothered me, I felt like the training wheels made it just fine. Finally I got to the point where they didn't make bikes big enough for me with training wheels, and so I quit riding. Then one day on vacation, I out of nowhere decided I wanted to learn to ride without them, and I learned in about 2 hours, maybe even less.

I played soccer as a kid and loved it, but I played defense and didn't have to worry about shots on goal. I never liked baseball (hitting the ball with the bat) or basketball (shooting at that tiny little hoop).

Count us in. Chris has horrible handwriting and has received OT for it through the school. It is now more legible but it could be much better. It pains him to write but he loves reading! He cannot tie his shoes and has no interest in trying to learn. He does not brush his teeth well. And he cannot ride a bike. BUT... we have an above ground pool and he has taught himself to swim. He now dives for toys and loves the water. He used to be freaked out when water would get in his eyes.

Katherine

our daughter freaks out when her head gets wet in the pool, but is *somewhat* ok with it getting wet in the tub. she absolutely refuses to swim underwater, or go underwater for that matter. swimming is out of the question~she doesn't seem to be coordinated enough to get it together.

You know this may change in a few years. We tried swim lessons about 3 years ago and he would not go for it. Fear and coordination probably at play mainly. It was his idea and he got brave. Could have knocked me over with a feather when he swam underwater. He is not a perfect swimmer, but he does very well for self taught. I think water is a great equalizer. Less strain on the joints which are sometimes a bit lax in Aspies. So once a child can float, knows to hold their breathe and loses the fear it all kind of comes together.

If water is something your family enjoys and does regularly your daughter will come around eventually when she is ready.

Katherine

i'm beginning to think that swimming might be good exercise for her~ maybe it would help with her poor gross motor control.

Well... I'm going to put my two cents in, even if they're not wanted or needed:

I... did various sports when I was younger. I won't say I ever really enjoyed them exactly, it was more a routine of doing sports that I didn't want to break. I did gymnastics, soccor, tennis, baseball (coach pitch... there was a rule that if a kid couldn't hit the ball after 12 or 13 pitches, he could use a T... I almost always needed the T), swimming, and cross-country.

I was never very good at any of the sports, but I didn't really mind doing them. Any type of exercise is something that I don't generally feel strongly one way or the other about doing.

I did bike.... I had more problems than my sister learning how, but she got hurt and I didn't. Partly because she has no pain threshold and partly because I was/am very careful in avoiding potentially harmful situations. I snow skied and water skied. It took me forever to let the ski instructors take off my noodles (holding the front of the snow skis). Finally I had to because we went to a resort that didn't have noodles.

I didn't have special trouble learning to tie my shoes I guess, but they did keep coming untied. My mother would retie them for me for years, as I remember.

I went to a lot of therapists to try to improve my handwriting. My 8th-9th grade English teacher found it illegible. I don't really hear complaints any more, but I don't think it has substancially improved. I always could read it easily and did not malform letters, although once I had a letter mistaken by a teacher in 11th grade (on a multiple choice test. I think it was an f that looked more like a p... however, the options for the answer were e, f, g, and h so I have no idea why she marked it wrong).

Yup... that's more or less it.