Graci’s Dysgraphia Story: From hating school to writer of the week

Kati McIlroy had a hunch about what was happening with her first-grade daughter Graci. “She just was not getting the formation of the letters down as quickly as her peers,” says Kati.

As Graci advanced in school, she would arrive home in tears every day. In addition to her regular homework, she had to spend an extra hour or two on the classwork she hadn’t completed during school hours. And her work was often unreadable, so she was asked to redo it. “She was exhausted. She had to work 50 times harder than her peers to do any writing tasks,” says Kati. “She was frustrated and beat down and always comparing her work to that of other students. She HATED school.”

Graci’s academic hardship was due to her eventual diagnosis of dysgraphia, a neurologically-based learning difference that impedes a person’s writing abilities. Kati had suspected this possibility early in Graci’s schooling, not just because she’s Graci’s mom, but because she’s an occupational therapist and assistive technology specialist by trade. OTs and ATs often work with learners with dysgraphia to offer evidence-based interventions and accommodations that can help. Kati was uniquely positioned not only to identify her daughter’s dysgraphia, but to equip her with the right tools to navigate it.

Kati’s opportunity arrived just as Graci began to really struggle towards the end of her third-grade year when a pandemic forced schools across the globe into a virtual learning format. “I preach to all of the assistive technology specialists, occupational therapists, and teachers that the second semester of third grade is when learning differences really come to the surface and things start to fall apart,” Kati says.

Just when Graci needed it the most, technology empowered her as a student. Her mother installed the assistive technology Co:Writer on her Chromebook. Working with Co:Writer,  learning and writing online, typing practice, and self-paced assignments changed everything for Graci. Co:Writer is like a virtual writing assistant built for people who have trouble writing independently, with features like finely-tuned predictive text, themed topic dictionaries, and advanced speech-to-text capabilities. As Kati put it in a recent email that she wrote to her coworkers:

Kati’s email to her coworkers told of what happened once Graci returned to in-person learning:

Dysgraphia impacts legibility, word spacing, spelling, and a writer’s ability to express their thoughts in writing. Memory recall is also affected. “A student has to put so much thought process into remembering just how letters are formed, where to start writing on a page, how to spell, that once they have put all their thoughts and efforts into just these components, they have forgotten what they were going to write about,” Kati says.

A student with dysgraphia will often produce handwritten work that doesn’t form complete thoughts, contains many misspellings, and appears very messy. “These students are helped by typing, or even better, they can use speech-to-text,” Kati says. “They are able to compose a beautiful sentence or paragraph out loud, but they just can’t write it. Sometimes even typing is not enough to help them get their thoughts onto paper.”

And that’s where assistive technology bridges the gap for struggling learners. It’s not that they can’t write, it’s just that they often have to find a different way to go about it. Co:Writer illuminated Graci’s path to confidence and achievement as a learner and writer. But returning to in-person learning presented another obstacle on that path. Despite the several months they spent learning on Chromebooks, students in Graci’s class didn’t have access to 1:1 devices. This was problematic because Graci didn’t want to be the only student in her classroom using a device to complete her work. She didn’t want to look different.

But, as Kati put it in her email, “With an amazing teacher, amazing things CAN happen.” 

Graci’s teacher was open to learning all about dysgraphia and how technology can benefit those who have it. And once she did, she realized how technology can benefit any learner with writing challenges, not just those who have dysgraphia. She made Chromebooks available in the classroom for those who want to complete assignments on them. Graci, along with several of her peers, use the Chromebooks daily.

Now, about that email….

So why is it that Kati was so eager to share Graci’s story with her fellow coworkers?

Kati is an employee of Don Johnston, Inc, the education tech company that makes Co:Writer. A long-time school-based occupational therapist, Kati chose to transition into a role as an educational support specialist for the company whose software she’d admired as an OT and AT for its capacity to transform student experiences.

Kati was inspired by the enormous gains her students were able to achieve with tools like Co:Writer and Snap&Read, and wanted to spend her time trying to get those tools into the hands of as many learners as possible. But she hadn’t anticipated that her biggest triumph would be getting them into the hands of her daughter, who is now thriving not only in the classroom but on-stage as an actress and singer. Graci particularly enjoyed playing Pepper in the musical Annie during her fourth-grade year and is looking forward to acting in more roles next year. And, incredibly, she is also looking forward to returning to school after the summer break.

As Kati wrote in that same email: