Dysgraphia Treatment Helps Kids Write Effectively!

Dysgraphia is a neurological condition that affects a child’s ability to write coherently. It is, in essence, a “writing dyslexia“. With proper dysgraphia treatment, your child can learn to write effectively!

If your child has dysgraphia, then it is difficult to coordinate writing with thinking.

Some common factors that play into this condition are poor gross motor skills, weak fine motor skills, and spatial problems.

There is also an inability to organize and process thoughts and ideas in a way that translates to legible, organized words, sentences, and paragraphs.

In addition, it is common for a student who has dyslexia to also have dysgraphia, as both deal with processing language.

Dysgraphia treatment that involves gross motor and fine motor skills is important for writing success.

Dysgraphia is a Common Learning Issue

Dysgraphia isn’t a rare, isolated learning problem! Since writing is a multi-pronged process, there are a lot of things that can go wrong.

For instance, at Bravo! Tutoring, we have found that students with dysgraphia have a difficult time thinking and writing at the same time. 

Of course, this interferes with the whole writing process!

Usually, children who strugggle with dysgraphia are bright, verbal, and have many stories to tell.

But something happens along the way, and they can’t seem to get these wonderful ideas written down on paper in an organized, legible way. 

For kids with dysgraphia, it’s just too difficult to think, make the pencil move across paper, and to organize thoughts in a meaningful way.

Because writing problems usually aren’t dealt with in early years, (thinking the child will outgrow them) emotional baggage adds into the mix.

This makes getting proper dysgraphia treatment important. Each year that goes by without dysgraphia help widens the learning gap and grades drop. Writing affects almost every subject in school!

Because of all these factors, children and teens with dysgraphia will often avoid writing like the plague! 

Many kids who struggle to write would rather miss recess, get a poor grade, or face embarrassment rather than construct an easy sentence or paragraph. This makes getting dysgraphia treatment crucially important!

Dysgraphia Treatment Makes Writing an Easy Process

Writing might seem easy to you. But if you look at what’s on a dysgraphia student’s plate, there’s no mystery why writing is a difficult process.

To start with, kids with dysgraphia often struggle with focusing, have ADD/ADHD, or have brains that process information quickly.

In addition, they’re usually quite verbal and intelligent.

Because of this, it’s simply too difficult for their writing hand (or typing hands) to keep up with racing thoughts or fast flying words.

When asked to perform a writing assignment, it’s as if they were asked to climb Mt. Everest. 

Or worse!

Children with dysgraphia will stall, delay, ask to go to the bathroom, remember something that must be done right now, or will sit quietly, telling you they are “thinking” when given a writing assignment. 

Minutes tick by and nothing is put down on paper. Dygraphia treatment can help these kids quit stalling and get right to work because writing quits being an emotional fear and a simple process they can master.

Motor Control is a Component of Dysgraphia Treatment!

Another problem that crops up is poor motor control. Too often, children with dysgraphia have a hard time with fine motor skills or muscle control in the hands and wrist.

They are often uncoordinated in general.

This makes it more difficult to get the task of writing done. Just writing one word might take a child with poor motor control twice as long as another child.

That’s because one of the three main writing steps isn’t being dealt with in a way that resonates with the student.

At Bravo! Tutoring, we start at square one and build up writing skills in a logical, sequential way.

When your child attends sessions at Bravo!, we work on coordinating the body with the brain as a starting point then branch out into more refined skills like word and sentence structure after these skills are set in.

One of Bravo! Tutoring’s best kept writing secrets is our Magic Eights activity!

By helping the left and right hemispheres of the brain communicate in a fun, flowing way, kids start to make gross motor skills strides right away.

When your child traces a marker in a lateral “eight” shape while writing letters, bilateral movements help the brain and the hands commucate with each other.

Dysgraphia treatment doesn’t have to be boring. Kids who come to Bravo! Tutoring have a ball flipping sponges and using sand trays – and more.

These are foundational motor skills activites that build up to bigger writing abilities!

Ricky’s Writing Before Using Our Magic Eights Activity:

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Ricky’s Writing After Using Our Magic Eights Activity:

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Why Dysgraphia Treatment is Important

By definition, dysgraphia is a neurological disorder and interferes with your child’s ability to process written information.

Dysgraphia causes writing fatigue, which interferes with the communication of ideas from the brain to the hand.

When your child has dysgraphia, it’s difficult to write information that is legible and coherent on paper or on the computer.

This is especially hard when original ideas need to be formed at the same time.

Children with dysgraphia struggle to keep up with the rapid demands of school assignments and writing expectations.

Since writing carries over to all subjects in school, low grades, poor test taking skills, and inferior self-esteem can crop up.

Most educators try to help kids with dysgraphia by primarily dealing with the writing component.

Others professionals deal with penmanship only, thinking that’s the best fix.

Many educators focus only on the visual processing skills involved. It’s rare to find someone who can effectively deal with all three.

But here’s the good news. It’s not difficult to help your child develop these skills through dysgraphia treatment. The secret is in how the skills are taught and the order in which they are learned.

At Bravo! Tutoring, we know that when these three writing skills have been taught correctly, kids can write with confidence and clarity!

Bravo! Tutoring Get Results with Three Types of Dysgraphia Treatment

There are three main types of dysgraphia, and all three must be treated in the following order for lasting writing results to take place.

• Motor dysgraphia
• Spatial dysgraphia
• Processing dysgraphia

Motor Dysgraphia​ Activities Make Writing Muscles Strong

Motor dysgraphia is the first type of dysgraphia that needs to be dealt with. It is the most basic level of all three types of dysgraphia.

Kids with motor dysgraphia usually struggle with letter formation, letter spacing, and overall handwriting legibility. 

They may also experience difficulties with pencil grip, hand fatigue, and awkward body postures while writing. 

When your child has motor dysgraphia, the connections between the brain and the hands aren’t working well.

At Bravo! Tutoring, we know the first step in helping your child learn to write better is to start dysgraphia treatment with simple muscle skills exercises that increase gross motor and fine motor abilities.

How Motor Skills Affect Writing:

• Muscles in the hands and wrists might be weak. Poor fine motor skills are the end result.
• The inability to move fingers and the hand /wrist with dexterity makes it difficult to engage in proper letter formation.
• Kids with poor motor control usually have a poor or incorrect pencil grip which makes it difficult to form letters correctly and is more laborious.
• Children with motor dysgraphia usually have a difficult time cutting with scissors which makes art work and other school projects messy.
• Writing simple letters is usually difficult for kids with dysgraphia, and they especially struggle with writing curved letters like o, a, b, c, d, g, p, q, s, and u.
• Kids who struggle with motor dysgraphia mix cursive and print together, which often makes handwriting illegible.
• With motor skills problems, spacing between written letters is either non-existent or the letters are all bunched together, causing illegible writing.
• When your child struggles with motor dysgraphia, penmanship is usually terrible because the process of writing is too hard.
• Words are often misspelled when your child has motor dysgraphia because it takes such a long time to get letters on paper. The letter combinations are forgotten in the process.
• Grammar is often incorrect because it’s too laborious to simply get letters on paper.

Muscle Control Dysgraphia Treatment Makes the Difference

It is important that children with dysgraphia are exposed to activities that strengthen muscle control before being asked to do more difficult writing assignments such as sentence or paragraph production.

If your hand or finger muscles are weak, then telling you to write a paragraph is like asking someone with broken legs to run a marathon! 

Occupational therapists can help your child with poor motor control or you can use dysgraphia treatment like that offered at Bravo! Tutoring.

Dysgraphia treatment that deals with strengthening fine motor skills is important for writing success.

In addition, finger/wrist control learned through this treatment makes the mechanics of writing easier.

It’s also important to have brain integration activities so your child can begin the communication process with the hands and brain right from the start.

At Bravo! Tutoring, we know and understand that writing and muscle control start with gross motor skills before refining them into fine motor skills.

People learn from the outside in. That means that large muscle movements must be in place before small, fine motor skills can be mastered.

The body/brain connection is also importanty for building the foundation for this and other learning skills.

A strong motor skills foundation is the most important part of overcoming dysgraphia. If the muscles aren’t working properly, even typing on a computer is difficult.

Dysgraphia treatment that deals with motor skills issues is important for lasting writing success.

Spatial Dysgraphia Stops Your Child from Interpreting Information

The second type of dysgraphia is spatial dysgraphia, which is your child’s ability to interpret what is seen. Spatial skills are crucially important for writing.

After all, if you aren’t perceiving information correctly, it’s hard to write it correctly!

If your child doesn’t know where to put a letter on an assignment, writing is going to be confusing, especially on a “busy” worksheet.

In addition, if the letters, words, or numbers jumble in your child’s mind, (a symptom of dyslexia) writing can be difficult because it’s too hard to distinguish letters and words from each other.

Spatial skills deal with how objects are positioned relative to each other in space.  Tied closely to this skill is visual discrimination, which is the ability to tell the difference between different symbols, letters, numbers, or words.

Pereceptual and spatial abilities play a foundational role in writing because they allow a child to understand how letters, words, and sentences are organized on a page. Writing is not just a language task—it is also a visual-motor task that requires awareness of spacing, alignment, size, and directionality.

Children rely on spatial skills to keep letters properly sized, maintain consistent spacing between words, and write along a line without drifting.

Spatial and perceptual abilities help them recognize letter shapes, distinguish between similar forms (like b/d or p/q), and process how written information should look.

When these systems are strong due to proper dysgraphia treatment, writing becomes more automatic, organized, and legible.

Weak Spatial Skills Interfere with Writing Success

For children with dysgraphia, weak spatial and perceptual skills can significantly interfere with their ability to produce written work.

Kids with dysgraphia may struggle to judge how much space to leave between letters or words, resulting in crowded or overly spaced writing.

Letters may appear irregular in size, float above or below lines, or be inconsistently formed.

These children often have difficulty visualizing how a letter should look or where it belongs on the page, which slows down writing and increases frustration.

Because so much mental effort is spent on the physical act of writing, they may have trouble focusing on spelling, grammar, or expressing their ideas clearly.

Additionally, poor perceptual processing can make it difficult for children with dysgraphia to monitor and correct their own writing.

Children with spatial issues may not notice when letters are reversed, misaligned, or improperly spaced, and copying from the board or a book can be especially challenging.

This can lead to avoidance of writing tasks and decreased confidence in academic settings.

Strengthening spatial and perceptual skills through targeted, multisensory activities received in dysgraphia treatment can help improve handwriting fluency, organization, and overall written expression.

This gives kids with dysgraphia the tools they need to communicate more effectively.

​Processing Dysgraphia is in the Brain!

The third type of dysgraphia is processing dysgraphia, and this is usually the most difficult of all three types to put into place.

Processing dysgraphia is caused by issues with the orthographic loop – that part of the brain dealing with working memory and the permanent memory of letters, numbers, words, and sentences.

It’s extremely important that kids have strong motor and spatial skills before attempting to strenghten issues caused by processing dysgraphia.

To do so would be like asking a baby who only knows how to crawl to walk or run! It just won’t work because the foundational skills aren’t in place yet.

 When a child has processing dysgraphia, there is a missing component between working memory and sequencing of muscle movements of the fingers and hands. 

Writing Involves Automatic Movement

Automaticity is an important part of the writing processing.

This is when thinking and writing become automatic instead of having to use conscious thought to get a writing task done.

Writing needs to have automaticity or it will be too difficult to get paragraphs written with organization and uniformity.

If a child is struggling with processing dysgraphia, there is a glitch in the system. 

Ideas don’t get to the hands with ease. There is a block holding back the smooth flow and automaticity of writing.

Kids who struggle with writing processing issues have a difficult time organizing their thoughts and ideas. These are the kids whose writing rambles on and on. Sentences and paragraphs don’t flow.

Dysgraphia Treatgment Helps Kids Write with Ease!

If your child struggles with dysgraphia, you don’t have to lose sleep. Yes, it takes time and energy to put the writing pieces together. but with the right dysgraphia treatment, writing can be a fun, easy process for your child.

At Bravo! Tutoring, we start your child with large muscle movements in order to build a strong writing foundation.

Your child plays games and performs activities that strengthen visual motor integration, spatial skills, perceptual skills, fine motor skills, and hand/finger muscle building.

At the same time, your child strengthens both visual and auditory memory skills while at Bravo! Tutoring.

Students must be able to “see” and “hear” sounds, sounds of letters, words, and sentences for successful writing to occur.

This helps your child recall facts and information that is being written as well as makes the organization component more fluid.

Your child might have one, two, or all three types of dysgraphia.

In addition, there is often a crossover between dyslexia and dysgraphia. Your child might have both conditions or symptoms of both.

Getting proper dysgraphia treatment is important as well as an in depth evaluation.

The Dysgraphia Symptoms You Should be Aware Of!

• poor ability to cut with scissors
• awkward or difficult time learning/writing the alphabet
• avoiding or having poor fine motor skills and/or incorrect pencil grip
• poor letter control, especially with curved letters
• shutting down when asked to write – avoiding it at all costs
• fisting a pencil or pen instead of gripping the pencil correctly
• illegible writing
• mixing upper- and lower-case letters
• little or no spacing between words
• running words off of given lines
• difficulty composing words on own
• poor spelling and grammar
• words that blend together
• fatigue and tiredness from writing for short periods of time
• writing rambles with no organization of thoughts
• mixing print and cursive
• odd wrist, arm, body, or paper orientations such as bending an arm into an L shape while writing
• poor posture when writing
• inconsistent form and size of letters, or unfinished letters
• inefficient speed of copying
• inattentiveness over details when writing
• frequent need of verbal cues or visual stimulation when writing
• gets extremely close to paper when writing
• feeling of finger, hand, or wrist pain when writing

Physical Activities that Strengthen Gross Motor Skills

• horseback riding
• martial arts
• yoga and or Pilates for core development
• exercise with a large workout ball
• balance board activities
• jumping rope
• jumping jacks
• catching a ball
• marching
• balance beam activities
• rolling down hills
• crossing the invisible mid-line of the body

How to Help Your Child Hold a Pencil Correctly:

• use fat pencils
• use fat markers
• use dot dabbers or bingo markers for most activities until fine motor skills are strengthened
• use pencil grippers
• use cursive writing if possible; cursive flows with the students’ ideas and it is difficult to make reversals with cursive
• use our letter number formation book with dot dabbers to help form letters in a multi-disciplinary fashion
• go from the outside in – work gross motor skills first then advance to fine motor skills
• table circles and other cross lateral movement activities are beneficial

Steps to Help the Process of Writing:

• sitting properly with a straight back
• fine motor skills
• flowing thoughts
• correct pencil grip
• the ability to organize thoughts into writing
• dictation
• using a picture to use as a visual cue and the student writes about just what he sees
• organizing the paragraph with visual markers so the student knows where to put topic sentence, details, and concluding sentence
• is sequential – a student must be able to write letters, then words, then sentences, then paragraphs    

Myths About Dysgraphia

• a student can just type on a computer to compensate for writing with a pen or pencil
• dysgraphia will go away on its own
• illegible handwriting is common for boys; they don’t need to learn to write
• we have so much technology now that writing isn’t important
• writing more will make my child or student a better writer
• if I correct my child’s writing enough, he will understand what to
• if I have my child copy sentences or words five or more times, it will fix the dysgraphia just through repetition alone
• a correct pencil grip is not important as long as my child’s writing is legible
• my child has wonderful ideas; he can just tell them to a tape recorder and then he won’t have to write
• writing is no longer an important skill; with technology students don’t need to write
• you can outgrow poor writing once you are older
• it is a sign of intelligence to have poor writing

Truths About Dysgraphia

• students can be taught to write and to write well
• practicing handwriting skills is not enough to help a student overcome most types of dysgraphia
• writing is a process and needs to be dealt with as such
• writing is sequential – you must have a to get to b; b to get to c; and so forth
• a student who is holding a pencil incorrectly will fatigue faster than one who is holding it correctly
• dysgraphia can be overcome
• the best way to help a student with dysgraphia is to treat all three types
• typing is just as difficult for most dysgraphic students as writing
• we need to learn to write in our society still, by using a pen or pencil; although much has turned over to technology, schools and workplaces still demand the ability to write with a pen or pencil
• once a student is out of school and into the workforce, employers will expect a student to write; there aren’t many accommodations or modifications for employees who can’t do their assigned jobs.  By not being able to write, it limits a person’s ability to get and hold down a job
• writing can be physically painful for students, and this is often why they avoid it

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