Developmental Coordinator Disorder

It's been a bleak start to this month in terms of no sunshine, although I hear some is promised for tomorrow.  Bleak in other ways too, as I look back on my previous post and the reference to the strife in Ontario's education system.  Don't we all wish that would resolve soon with all sides feeling good.

Let's carry on with the Fact Sheets I started earlier.  So far we have discussed Dyslexia, ADHD, and Dyscalculia. Today it's Developmental Coordination Disorder.

Some children may experience difficulties in a variety of areas while others may have problems only with specific activities.

DCD is a lack of coordination between your mental intentions and your ability to get your body to carry out those intentions. For example, you might think, “I need to tie my shoe.” However, your brain does not properly send the instructions for shoe tying to your hands and feet. Your brain knows how to tie shoes, but your hands just can’t follow your brain’s instructions. 

Testing for DCD can be done by professionals such as pediatricians, while others such as physical and occupational therapists, as well as educational evaluators, can test but cannot make an official diagnosis.  The evaluator will compare the child's abilities with those of other children the same age.

There are five core areas that are assessed.  Briefly (because the full article is here), they are:

1. Strength 
2. Balance
3. Coordination
4. Visuomotor Skills
5. Fine Motor and Graphomotor Skills

Medication is not prescribed for DCD but there are therapies to help develop motor skills.  Different specialists work on different aspects of the disorder.  Occupational therapists focus on coordination; physical therapists work on muscle strength.

Support in school might include:

• text to speech software
• touchscreens
• keyboards
• paper with wide, coloured, or raised lines

Check here for more ideas about school accommodations. One of the suggestions that makes sense for all students is to ensure that the chair and/or desk height is appropriate so the child can sit with his feet on the floor, shoulders relaxed, and forearms supported on the desk.  But another suggestion is to allow the child to work in other positions, including standing. 

And I like this one - if using a computer isn't an option - use different writing instruments (such as thin markers or gel pens) which help to reduce the pressure when using a pencil.  I tell my students that the only people allowed to have white knuckles are pilots!  I should be able to take a pencil/pen from their grasp.

Here's a wonderful page to for multisensory handwriting techniques.  Some key ideas (and these are NOT limited to kids with DCD):

• Use dark-ruled and 'bumpy' paper.  Here's a template. The bold lines top and bottom with a dotted line in the middle help the child see barriers and keep the letters from drifting around.

• Trace and do mazes help develop fine motor control and help him learn how to orient her movements from left to right, top to bottom.  The mazes help him stay within a designated space.  
  
• Santa gave me an LCD Boogie Board for Christmas;  it's a full-size board and comes with templates.  It's ideal because the writing doesn't smudge so lefties have no problem. I could easily put the dark ruled paper under it, but I could also make those modifications on the template that comes with the Board. There are kid-sized versions that are fun and useful too.

• A Space Buddy or Space Kid helps those kids who have trouble with the spaces between words and letters. One version (Space Buddy) is to glue a brightly coloured button atop a colourful craft stick.  The stick placed sideways goes between letters; the button between words.  The Space Kid is a little simpler.

Finally, here's an activity I haven't seen in the discussion about DCD, but I think is most appropriate.  It's called the Spider Web Maze - it's a homemade indoor maze that kids can climb in, on, around, and through. It uses fine motor skills and visual motor planning, plus hand-eye coordination, and it turns your living room into an awesome spider web using the furniture and a lot of yarn! The photo is worth a 1000 words!

• Moving over, under, and around requires gross motor skills and motor planning to plan out, organize, and carry out an action.  Adding a ring and moving it along the yarn adds another developmental skill. The child has to scan where the ring will go next and manage her hands to work the ring along the yarn. She has to hold the yarn with one hand and string the ring along with the other, all while moving under and over the string below and under her.
• 

Daniel Radcliffe (he of Harry Potter fame) has stated that he has been diagnosed with DCD.
He claims that primary school was really hard for him because he felt he was awful at
everything but it is obvious that he overcame that!