Dyspraxia Academic Support Beyond Tutoring

Dyspraxia is not an official diagnosis; rather, it is a group of movement disorders that will often include other symptoms such as poor social skills or inattention. Often children may also be labelled with DCD (developmental coordination disorder).

Dyspraxia is a specific problem with movement and includes challenges with:

fine motor skills

gross motor skills

movement (motor planning) and completion

coordination

speech

A student with dyspraxia will often have difficulties with everyday life skills such as self-care, writing, typing, riding a bike, and playing. As dyspraxia is a lifelong condition, it will also affect ‘adult’ skills such as learning to drive a car and working on computers.

Dyspraxia often also affects students socially because it can lead to difficulty with time management, organization, memory, and processing. This can be misconstrued as the student having poor social and emotional skills when in reality they have no intellectual challenges; they simply need more time to respond and problem solve.


Types of Dyspraxia

Motor dyspraxia: difficulty with planning, sequencing and executing a correct movement pattern

Verbal dyspraxia: difficulty with programming, sequencing, and starting the mouth movements required to make sounds

Oral dyspraxia: difficulty with planning and executing non-speech sounds, such as blowing, sucking, or individual tongue/lip movements


Common Issues Associated with Dyspraxia

Students are often mislabeled as ‘slow’, and they will tend to respond slower to instructions than their peers even though they are intellectually able.

Students often avoid sports or team games due to being uncoordinated and clumsy.

Completing work in a neat and organized manner is challenging. Often handwriting will be hard to read or students will take an extremely long time to write. Getting things like the date, title, and layout copied correctly from a board is hard.

Students may have difficulties eating and playing with others without being ‘messy’.

Students may experience poor attention spans and difficulty concentrating on a task.


How We Support Students with Dyspraxia

Constant multisensory teaching to practice fine and gross motor skills

Developing checklists/visual prompts for the student to refer to in class

Establishing good routines to allow students to self-advocate e.g. do they need wider lined paper, colour paper, graph paper?

Introducing students to assistive technology programs such as Text-to-Speech and mod math

Pre-teaching, role-playing and rehearsing anticipated classroom challenges and social situations

Developing executive functioning procedures and being taught ways of carrying out activities they find difficult, such as breaking down difficult movements into much smaller parts


Get Started with Dyspraxia Support Today

1 to 1 button

contact us button


Further Reading and Resources

https://www.understood.org/en/learning-attention-issues/child-learning-disabilities/dyspraxia/understanding-dyspraxia
https://dyspraxiafoundation.org.uk/about-dyspraxia/
https://ldc.org.au/documents/LDC%20Fact%20Sheet%20-%20Dyspraxia.pdf

 

Download the PDF version of this page here.