Unwritten

We had parent/teacher conferences on Monday. Interesting thing: they are both doing great in their separate classrooms - excelling in reading and math - but they both need to work on their handwriting.

Aidan's writing is just messy because his brain works faster than his hand, so we need to work on getting him to slow down enough for it to be legible.

Owen, on the other hand, just doesn't want to do it. He hates the act of writing. This seems to be his only major source of meltdowns in the classroom. He can write - it's actually one of the few things he mastered before Aidan did - he just doesn't like it and has been refusing to do it. We think part of it is that he struggles to form his ideas into words, but thanks to this uncannily-timed story from NPR, it turns out that it might also be that the physical act of it is more difficult than we realized.

As a parent of a child with a disorder so confusing and mysterious, I can't tell you how exciting it is to read an article about it and actually go, "That's our situation! That's Owen!" Of course, the story doesn't exactly offer solutions, but even just identifying it as a common issue is helpful (mentally, at least). I am anxious to see if teaching him to type could help him get over the handwriting hurdle and let him focus on learning alongside his peers.

Because seriously, if writing turned out to be his biggest obstacle in school, well...I could deal with that.