The Writing Glitch: Hack Dysgraphia No Pencil Required

In today's episode, Jan interviews Cheri about why and how she became a dysgraphia expert. She shares a story about a student having difficulty recalling his sight words. Together, they created the first Body Sentence Alphabet. That night, Cheri went home and finished the alphabet. You can learn more about the alphabet at www.cheridotterer.com/bodysentencealphabet

Show Notes

Today we are taking a break from guest interviews so Cheri can share more of her story. She shares a story of a student who was having difficulty with sight words and how she used kinesthetic interventions to enhance his retention to spell a sight word. He continues to use this method. Cheri's Body Sentence Alphabet was the result of this discussion. It is available on her website, and Teachers Pay Teachers. Cheri also explains the definition of dysgraphia in the DSM-5 and how it is differentiated from dyslexia and dyscalculia. Find out more about Cheri at her website. Share your insights from this episode inside The Writing Glitch Community

Body Sentence Alphabet
Body Sentence Alphabet on Teachers Pay Teachers
★ Support this podcast ★

Creators & Guests

Host
Cheri Dotterer
Cheri is an international speaker, author, and consultant who helps teachers, therapists, and parents build clarity, community, and competency around the barriers to writing success. Her book, Handwriting Brain-Body DisConnect, has remained in the Top 100 on Amazon since publication in Handwriting Reference and Learning Disabilities. It was also a Top 10 Finalist in the Author Academy Awards in 2019. In addition, she was nominated the USA 2022 Dysgraphia Expert of the Year by Global Health and Pharma Magazine. She has worked in many concentration areas as an occupational therapist for 30 years. However, it wasn't until starting her private practice that she found her passion for helping others understand this disability. In addition, she has been an adjunct instructor at several universities. She lives with her husband of 32 years. They have two adult children. Her heroes are Evelyn Yerger, her grandmother, and Esther, Queen of Susa. Together, we can grow 110 million leaders and hack dysgraphia by building skills, applying knowledge, and transcending futures.
Producer
Jan Orcutt
Jan is an entrepreneur with family who suffer from ADHD and dysgraphia.

What is The Writing Glitch: Hack Dysgraphia No Pencil Required?

The Writing Glitch is brought to you by Dotterer Educational Consulting. Our Founder and Owner, Cheri Dotterer, is the host.

Build courage, compassion, and collaboration to help students thrive and grow leaders that transcend a lifetime, regardless of dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia, using sensory-motor processing and neuroscience-based instructional interventions. No Pencil Required!

We interview teachers, therapists, and parents about how they have seen a transformation in children having these disabilities and co-morbid conditions such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). They share how they help students grow and prosper.

We believe we can grow 110 million leaders together by building skills, applying knowledge, and transcending futures. Join us to hack dysgraphia. No Pencil Required.

Each episode contains one intervention to help you support students with writing challenges the next day you are in your classroom. These interventions are explicit, systematic, cumulative, and multisensory. They are designed to support ALL students through targeted, daily visual-perceptual, visual-motor, and memory interventions. These interventions benefit all students and harm none.

All students have access to writing regardless of their status in the classroom. The interventions were created to take up to 30 seconds to 2 minutes of your classroom time. Strategic lesson planning increases classroom engagement.

All interventions can be adapted for students with physical disabilities because they support the Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) and well-being of all students. In addition, these interventions impact all subject matter classrooms. Whether you are teaching English language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, music, or art, these interventions will benefit your classroom atmosphere across ALL grade levels.

You have put your blood, sweat, and tears into investing in your education and children. Don’t let a misunderstanding about this disability stop you from providing best practices.

In case you don’t know me. I’m Cheri Dotterer, 2022 Dysgraphia Expert of the Year. This honor was bestowed on me by Global Health and Pharma Magazine. In 2023, they awarded my company the Best Dysgraphia Professional Development Program.

It took challenges at home and on the job to wake me up to the impact dysgraphia has on all students. Struggling my entire life with communication issues, I was mistaken that only students with learning disabilities could have dysgraphia.

My thoughts shifted when my gifted daughter asked for help with spelling. My son struggles with handwriting. Then, a parent asked me why her child could read and have trouble writing. Finding answers became the drive that gets me out of bed in the morning.

It’s a big shock when you discover how pervasive writing difficulties are and how little people know about how to help–even OTs. I used to think I was the only OT who struggled with understanding dysgraphia. It turns out many have questions.

Occupational, physical, and speech therapists are not trained to teach. Teachers are.

Occupational, speech, and physical therapists are trained in neuroscience. Teachers are not.

Let this podcast be your first line of defense to help your students transcend their learning disabilities. Show your school district how much you genuinely care about all of your students by sharing it with your colleagues.

After each episode, I challenge you to share your key takeaway from the podcast in our FREE yet private community. Share your student wins. Get support on the challenges.

Join The Writing Glitch Community. https://thewritingglitch.com/
Connect with Cheri at www.cheridotterer.com or info@thewritingglitch.com

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, depending on when you listen to the podcast. The podcast is available on Apple and Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and several other platforms. I'm Jan Orcutt, along with Cheri Dotterer, an occupational therapist, and dysgraphia expert. Welcome to The Writing Glitch Hacking Dysgraphia no pencil required episode seven. In this episode, Cheri tells the story of how she became an educational consultant. Cheri is the founder of Dotterer Educational Consulting and The Writing Glitch. Cohost of this podcast. I'm excited to hear Cheri's perspective on the most important aspects of dealing with dysgraphia for teachers, therapists, and parents.
Hello, Cheri. How are you today? Really?
I'm fabulous. I felt back to myself after that five-day challenge two weeks ago, and it took until this past weekend to get some well-needed rest to feel like myself again. But how are you, Jan? How are you really?
Well, I'm feeling optimistic and a bit anxious all at the same time.
I have lots of things going on with school, work, and my family that are all good but also a bit nerve-wracking. Like having your adult child move to New York City for the first time. If you've been listening to other pot episodes, Cheri and I discussed this word really at the beginning.
Today. I'm sharing my reasons for asking why. Really, I like the way it makes people pause rather than answering with a knee-jerk reaction like I’m just like that. It makes people stop and think, how am I really? It also indicates that the person asking really may care about your response.
That is so cool. I love the way it changes perspectives.

Before we continue, we need to introduce our sponsor. Today's podcast was brought to you by Dotterer Educational Consulting. We are a holistic community-based organization that supports people with dysgraphia from the inside out. We use neuroscience and research-based content to design interventions for the whole classroom that can be completed for two minutes each day and thwart this disability before it becomes a challenge.
All this without raising the scepter. Stop all this without raising the scepter—a pencil. You can find more information about our services by downloading the app.TheWritingGlitch.com app.TheWritingGlitch.Com. Use #TheWritingGlitch and #dysgraphiaawareness. Anytime you make a statement about dysgraphia. We believe that every person is a king or queen of their own potential.
Unleashing that potential starts with effective writing skills. Effective writing skills start by connecting the brain and body. Join The Writing Glitch Community today.
Cheri, are you ready to share some gold nuggets?
I sure am.
What was the catalyst behind Dotterer Educational Consulting?
I started working in school-based therapy about 15 years into my career. My daughter was in middle school and came to me and said, I can't spell this word. Initially, she was doing great with all of those sight words and the words that were phonetically spelled.
She got into a longer word and came to me and going. I can't spell it, mom. I can't spell it. How do we get me to spell this word? So we tried a couple of different things, and basically, I told her a technique that I used to use as a child: changing the way you pronounce the word to help you understand how to spell the word.
The word was “appreciate.” We played around with some ways to get her to spell it, and it ultimately ended up being “a priest. I ate” okay, you're not can. We're not cannibals. But it helped her spell the word, even though there was no S in the word. I have no idea how it worked.
She was able to spell the word, so we moved on. Then, I had this mom come to me, the first student I had. How can my child read above grade level and not be able to write?
I went, um, I don't know. It took me a little while and a lot of research to figure out how to answer her question. The more I did research, the more I found there was no information about dysgraphia out there. And it was like, Okay, now I know which direction I want to take to really be different and unique and have a value proposition.
That was not the same as most of the OTs that were out there creating handwriting curriculums. I knew I didn't want a handwriting curriculum, but I had this itch to have my own business, but I had no idea what that should look like.
and. Low and behold. The next thing I knew, I had enough material, and I put it into a document, and it had enough pages to be a book, so it turned into a book, and from there, it turned into a business.
Tell us more about the book. I understand it won a Top 10 finalist award with Author Academy Awards, and as a result, it was placed in a pool that was picked up by a foreign publisher, translated into Turkish, and published in 2021. On Amazon, it has remained in the top 100 in the learning disabilities and handwriting reference categories since publication.

Oh my. How humbling that is to hear somebody else say those accomplishments. Yeah. The book is called Handwriting Brain Body Disconnect: Adaptive strategies to help you with dysgraphia, whether you are in a classroom or at home.
It is a kind of textbook for a parent, a therapist, or a teacher. When I was writing the book, I was really focused on helping the parents understand the neuroscience behind the writing. It also helped me understand all the nuances behind writing, how the pieces fit together, and why we were doing interventions the way we were doing them as occupational therapists.
And then trying to streamline, if I had a kid that had this part of the Disability, what would I do to help them? So the book is really a summary and a synopsis of that early research. Today I've got to say that I some of the information in the book I already feel I have outdated, and maybe when it's ten years old, I will revise it a little bit and get it more current. But at this point, it's still out there, and it is helping parents, it's helping teachers. The thing that really blows my mind about it is it helps occupational therapists.
I realized that I wasn't alone on this island of not knowing what intervention to do. Other occupational therapists were also having concerns about what is the best intervention to do. What is the best way to streamline those interventions? it's not just helped the parents and the teachers. It has also helped the therapist.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what dysgraphia is. How do you define dysgraphia?

In the book, I talk a lot about what I D E A says. I D E A is the individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Around the time it got published, a month or so later, the new DSM came out. The new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health disorders, otherwise known as the Bible of mental health.
I found a copy and started looking for dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia in that publication, and I found it. How they describe, and they define dysgraphia in the DSM five is it is grammar, punctuation, capitalization, sentence structure. paragraph, organization, spelling, and clarity, and they further explain it by adding two qualifiers that the activity demands are exceeding the student's capacity and that it's going to interfere with activities of daily living.
For those of you who don't know what I mean by the activity of daily living, that is any activity that you do throughout the day that helps you function. , brushing your teeth, brushing your hair, putting your clothes on, taking a bath. Those are all activities of daily living. But I think what they're really referring to with these activities of daily living are those fine motor skills that you need to get in and out of the school day.
You need to be able to open and close buttons and zippers to get your coat on and off or your pants up and down. You need to be able to open a container. Those fine motor skills are activities of daily living.
Now, what it is not, this is where I went. Oh my, okay, I think I get it, but let's go over what it is not. . It is not an intellectual disability, visual or auditory Disability. It is not a mental health disorder. It is not a neurological disorder. It is not psychological adversity. And then they threw in these two zingers, and that was, it is not a lack of proficiency in language skills, and it is not inadequate instruction.

Over the last two years, we've had such turmoil in the education world that lack of proficiency and language skills is going to be a hard trigger this year school to help these kids who may not have had any real good handwriting classes from kindergarten on those entering second grade this year.
Are at a true disadvantage to those that had kindergarten and are entering third grade this year.
Interesting. Interesting perspective. Absolutely. How does dysgraphia relate to ADHD, or is it related? I mentioned that it is not a neurological disorder when I talk about dysgraphia.
Well, ADHD is a neurological disorder. If you look in the DSM-5, ADHD is at a totally different location in the manual. When you sit back, and you go, Okay, so what's the connection? The connection is that ADHD is the neurological condition that's preventing us from accessing writing. Therefore, ADHD is really the premier diagnosis, and dysgraphia is a functional diagnosis.
A secondary diagnosis according to the DSM-5. How are they related? ADHD is the driver, and dysgraphia is the functional outcome.
Is that what they mean when they say that ADHD is all about executive function?
Yes. Executive function skills are those things that help us with organization and, planning, initiating tasks, amongst other functions.
We need to be able to initiate a task and actually get it started, and if we can't get it started, we're not going to be able to write it. If we can't figure out how to organize and plan a paragraph, we're not going to write it. That's how they're connected.

Interesting. that really clarifies it. , many people confuse dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia.
Some people don't even know what that means. Could you tell us more about the relationship of those three?
Yes. In that section of the DSM five, they are considered specific learning disabilities. Each one of them has several categories that qualify them.
In short, Lexi means to write according to the qualifications. It is effort filled and slow with their reading, misunderstanding a vow or a consonant when they're doing some reading fluency. That is, what are some of the characteristics of reading?
Dyscalculia, Calc means math. Dyscalculia is essentially a misunderstanding and a lack of understanding of number sense. What is number sense? Number sense is the understanding of what a number is in relationship to other numbers.
If I see the number four written out and I don't get that, that means four individual pieces of something. Is that what you mean?
Yes. It also is the relationship to how far away a number line is from a hundred verses. zero. How is it related to a negative four? What does it look like, and the whole magnitude of comparing number to number?
I understand. We're at the time in our podcast when we need to hear about an intervention. In each episode, we share an intervention that helps teachers, parents, and occupational or speech therapists with their students. Cheri, do you have an intervention that a teacher could use here in the whole classroom that would take about two minutes to

implement?
Absolutely, I do. In my book, on page 1 56, there is an alphabet. That alphabet is called the body sentence alphabet. And let me tell you about the backstory behind it before I tell you what it is. I had this student who was struggling with his sight words, and he's like, Miss Cheri, I want to learn how to spell enough today.
Okay, so how do you spell enough? And he spelled it E N U F.
It sounds a little phonetic, doesn't it? How do we take that and translate that to include kinesthesia? I had been listening to and taking a course from Jim Kwik. Jim Kwik teaches how to do extensive memory skills. Jim was a student that had all three specific learning disabilities. He did not read until he was 12 years old.
That was seventh grade until he could actually understand words. He struggled with putting sentences and paragraphs together. In elementary school today, he will be in front of an audience, and he will randomly pick out a hundred people, ask them their name, and he will then respond by telling everybody in the audience their names, and he gets it right every time.
How does he do it? He has learned memory strategies. One of those strategies that he was using was taking something in your room and associating that with the person's name. It could be Jan. Jan came through the door. Okay. Jan door. Now I remember Jan. Making that association in a way that you have seen the person.

Well, for this child, his executive function skills weren't developed well enough that he could make that abstract connection. The only connection he could make was to his body. How do you spell enough? We were looking at the letters, and I said, so what on your body starts with an E?” My eyes, Okay, we have some things that are nearby that start with an N.
What do you think? Yeah. Nose. We proceeded, had more discussion, and we ended up going eyes, nose, open mouth, lining the chin, because the chin looks like a U, and then give, we like reach out and handshake, and then high five. So, it was eyes, nose, open under the chin, give hand, and I went. It worked.
Mom emailed me a day or so later and said he spelled it right on his spelling test. And, of course, we had a cheer, and I went, Okay, so it worked for one. How do we get it to work, in other words?
I tried to figure out a motion that was part of the body. That motion is called Kinesthesia. What I found in spelling was that it was a lot of visual and auditory. Orton Gillingham practices used tapping, but for the word enough, it wasn't helping this student, that sound of the F, instead of the spelling of the O U G H, was not working.
We had to take a step back and look at a motion for every letter and take that motion, making it big on Monday, when they first get the spelling test and then get it to the point where they could visualize it by the time. They took their spelling test. It's fun when you watch kids who have done this with one or two words.
They'll get to that word that was tough. And they'll be sitting at the spelling test, and you can see them. They have the pencil in their hand. They have the paper in front of them, and you see their hands moving, and you can just see that they're going through the sequence of the sentence that they've created for that particular word.
It's a Body Sentence Alphabet. It's not that original name, but it sufficed. I have the body sentence alphabet on my website at http://www.cheridotterer.com/bodysentencealphabet I also have it on my Teacher's Pay teacher's site. It is free. You can download it, share it with your class, and utilize it for those kids that are struggling. On my website, I added a video that shares two students spelling the word because, and it's absolutely adorable. Enjoy the alphabet.
Sounds great. Thank you. This has been Jan Orcutt, along with Cheri Dotterer, dysgraphia expert of The Writing Glitch
I interviewed Cheri today about her journey from parenting to dysgraphia expert. Our podcast releases on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month during the school year.
Remember to use #TheWritingGlitch when sharing our episodes so we can thank you. Join The. Writing Glitch today, app.TheWritingGlitch.com. Remember, you were put here for such a time as this, Transform the classroom before raising the scepter, a pencil to Unleash Student Potential Podcast Post-production is managed by Sam C Productions.