Week 5 - Handwriting Flashcards

1
Q

What is the development of prewriting & handwriting in young children?

A
  • 10 to 12 months: scribble
  • 2 years old: imitates horizontal, vertical and circular marks on paper
  • 3 years old: copy horizontal, vertical and circle
  • 4 to 5 years: copies a cross, right oblique cross, some letters & numerals, able to write their own name
  • 5 to 6 years: copies a triangle, print own name, copies most lowercase & uppercase letters
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2
Q

What are the pre-requisite skills for handwriting?

A
  • Hand muscle development
  • Eye-hand coordination
  • Ability to hold utensils / writing equipment
  • Capacity to form basic strokes smoothly
  • Letter recognition & discrimination
  • Orientation to printed language
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3
Q

What are the 6 developmental classification of Benbow?

A
  1. Upper extremity support
  2. Wrist and hand development
  3. Visual control
  4. Bilateral integration
  5. Spatial analysis
  6. Kinesthesia
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4
Q

What is the age that typical developing children are ready for handwriting instruction?

A

Latter half of kindergarten school year

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5
Q

How does poor visual-cognitive ability affect handwriting?

A
  • Poor attention: difficulty in letter formation, spelling, mechanism of grammar, punctuation and capitalisation, formulating a sequential flow of ideas required for written communication
  • Poor visual memory: mixing upper and lower case letters, writing the same letter in different ways, unable to print letter from memory, poor legibility, may need a model to write
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6
Q

How does poor visual discrimination affects handwriting?

A
  • Not being able to recognise errors in their own handwriting
  • Unable to recognise letters / words in different prints -> difficulty copying
  • Poor recognition of letter / numbers in different position / size
  • Poor figure-ground discrimination: difficulty copying due to inability to determine what is to be written
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7
Q

How does poor visual-spatial problems manifest as?

A
  • Reversing letters and words
  • Over space or under space between words and letters; inconsistent spacing
  • Trouble keeping within margin
  • Poor shaping / closure of individual letters
  • Lack of uniformity in orientation and size
  • Difficulty placing letters on a line and adapting letter size to the space provided on the paper
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8
Q

What is the pencil grip progression in different age?

A
  • 10 to 12 months: primitive grip (hold / write using whole hand, pronating forearm, using shoulder to move pencil)
  • 18 to 30 months: transitional pencil grip (pencil being held with flexed fingers, forearm pronated or supinated)
  • 6.5 to 7 years: mature pencil grip (stabilized with distal phalanges of the thumb, index, middle and possibly ring finger, wrist slight extended yet dynamic, forearm supinated rest on the table)
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9
Q

What is considered mature pencil grips?

A
  • Dynamic tripod grasp
  • Lateral tripod
  • Dynamic quadrupod
  • Lateral quadrupod
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10
Q

What are some ways to analyse a child’s handwriting?

A
  • Work samples: comparing with other peers
  • File review: academic performance, special tests, special services, medical reports
  • Direct observation: task performance, attention, behaviour of the child, interaction with teachers and peers
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11
Q

What are the domains of handwriting?

A
  • Legibility: letter formation, alignment, size, spacing, slant
  • Writing speed: letters per minutes
  • Ergonomic factors: biomechanics of writing posture, upper extremity stability, mobility and pencil grip
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12
Q

What are some ways to improve legibility?

A
  • Teaching letter formation (teach starting points, grouping letters with similar letter forms, writing out loud, repeat with different writing tools)
  • Teach alignment & sizing (tall, short, tail letters; sky, tree, ground)
  • Teach space concepts: box method, spacing using pinky, spacing errors, slashing
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13
Q

What are some considerations to take when teaching handwriting?

A
  • Level of adult guidance: HOH, verbal guidance, self-check
  • To improve learning of letters: multi-sensorial teaching method, consider sensory systems, writing tools
  • Other considerations: attention, motivation, self-esteem
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14
Q

What are some activities to improve fine motor control and isolate finger movement?

A
  • Picking up small objects using a tweezer
  • Rolling small clay between tips of thumb and index and middle finger
  • In-hand manipulation
  • Twisting open small objects using thumb, index and middle
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15
Q

What are some activities to promote graphic skills?

A
  • Draw lines & copy shapes using shaving cream, sand or finger paints
  • Colouring
  • Doing dot-to-dot pictures and mazes
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16
Q

What are some activities that help enhance right-left discrimination?

A
  • Connecting dots on the chalkboard with left-to-right strokes
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17
Q

What are some activities that help improve orientation to printed language?

A
  • Label their drawings based on their description
  • Encourage book-making with their favourite topics
  • Label common objects in the classroom or at home
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18
Q

What are some compensatory approaches for handwriting intervention?

A

Assistive technology

  • Text to speech: speaks as student type letters, words and sentence
  • Electronic spell check: provide immediate feedback on what has been typed and allows opportunities for self-correction
  • Picture supported text or picture library: pictures appears as student type words for building a sentence or story with pictures only
  • Abbreviated expansion: allows user to created their own shortened abbreviations for commonly used words or phrases
  • Word prediction
  • Electronic word and sentence banks: selected pictures, words, or sentence contained in a cell/button can be placed in a word processing document
  • Voice recognition software: user speaks into a microphone and the words are converted by the computer into text
19
Q

What are some ways to improve spacing between letters?

A
  • Spacing with index finger
  • Fingerprint spacing by pressing on a inked before finger spacing
  • Teach ‘no touching rule’ of letters
20
Q

What are some ways to improve spacing between words?

A
  • Use dots or dash (morse code) between words
  • Use adhesive strips (post-it) as spacers between words
21
Q

What are some ways to improve spacing on paper?

A
  • Use grid paper
  • Write on every other line of the paper
  • Draw coloured lines to mark (green is left, red is right)
22
Q

What are some ways to improve placing text on lines?

A
  • Using pictorial schemes on writing guidelines
  • Provide raised letter lines as tactile cues for letter placement
23
Q

What are some ways to improve letter and word sizing?

A
  • Individual box for each letter
  • Name letters with ascending stems, no stems and descending stems (e.g. sky, tree, soil)
24
Q

What are some ways to improve near-point copying?

A
  • Highlight text on the worksheet to be copied
  • Teach student to copy 2-3 letters at a time
25
Q

What are some ways to improve far-point copying?

A
  • Enlarge print for better viewing
  • Start with copying from nearby vertical models
  • Position student to be facing the board
26
Q

What are some ways to improve dictation?

A
  • Attach letter strip to the table for the student who cannot remember letter forms
  • Dictated spelling words to contain some but not all letters
27
Q

What are some ways to improve composition?

A
  • Provide magnetic words to write short poems or stories
28
Q

What are some ways to improve speed?

A
  • Allow student to start on projects early to finish with peers
  • Preselect volume of work to be done that may be different from that of peers?
29
Q

What should we observe about SITTING POSTURE and how can we improve it?

A

Observe:
- Slouching
- Leaning on table
- Head resting on table
- Shoulder hiking up
- Hooked wrist
- Feet flat on the ground

Ways to improve:
- Environment - table & chair height
- Leaning / slouching - wheelbarrow walk / animal walk
- Shoulder hiking & hooked wrist - write on vertical surface, lying on tummy and supported on elbow while doing activities

30
Q

What should we observe about PAPER ALIGNMENT and how can we improve it?

A

Observe:
- Child rotating body / arm during writing

Ways to improve:
- Teaching correct positioning of paper

  • Paper slanted and parallel to forearm of the writing hand
  • Right-handed student: slant paper 25-30 degrees to the left
  • Left-handed student: slant paper 30-35 degrees to the right
  • Left-handed with hooked grasp: same as right-handed
31
Q

What should we observe about PENCIL GRIPS and how can we improve it?

A

Observe
- Thumb wrap
- Thumb tuck
- Inter-digital brace
- Palmar
- Digital pronated
- Calligraphic grip

Ways to improve
- Hand strengthening & fine motor control
- Pencil marking (where to hold the pencil)
- Choice of pencil (thicker, pencil grip pieces)
- Holding small objects nearest to last 2 fingers

32
Q

What should we observe about HAND MUSCLES and how can we improve it?

A

Observe
- Tight or lose grips
- Writing too dark or too light
- Compensating with inefficient grasp

Ways to improve
- Strengthening 3 fingers using resistive activities
- Writing too light: place paper over leaf and colour it, placing paper over sandpaper, writing on carbon paper
- Writing too dark: placing paper over oft surface

33
Q

What should we observe about FINE MOTOR and how can we improve it?

A

Observe
- Lack of dynamic pencil control
- Lack of fluency during writing
- Not well formed letters: jagged lines, overlaps

Ways to improve
- Simple rotation: changing colour during tracing / colouring / drawing
- Shifting: playing games that requires shifting pencil up and down
- Complex rotation: colour pencil with 2 sides
- Activities requiring precision: maze, tracing, joining the dots
- Dynamic control: colouring, drawing patterns

34
Q

What should we observe about COORDINATION OF 2 HANDS and how can we improve it?

A

Observe
- Lack of supporting hand
- Difficulty with cutting: manipulating turning of paper during cutting

Ways to improve
- Encourage supporting hand through table top tasks
- Daily tasks: opening container, buttoning, feeding

35
Q

What should we observe about MOTOR PLANNING SKILLS and how can we improve it?

A

Observe
- Clumsy movement
- Use inefficient ways to do things
- Slower in learning letter formation

Ways to improve
- CO-OP (GPDC)

36
Q

What are the different types of visual perception skills?

A
  • Visual attention: affect learning of letters
  • Visual memory: affect ability to produce letter from memory
  • Visual sequential memory: affect ability to recall / spell words in the correct sequence
  • Visual spatial concept: may affect spacing and letter alignment
  • Visual discrimination: affect ability to recognise errors in own handwriting, different print, fonts, size
  • Figure-ground discrimination: affect ability to identify the letters / word to copy within a sentence
  • Coordinated eye movements: fixation, saccades, near-far focus shift
37
Q

What are some ways to improve visual perception skills?

A

Spatial concept
- playing / maneuvering through obstacles
- copying a design (e.g lego, tangram)
- Simon says game

Letter reversal
- Using hand gesture to identify b, d, p, q
- Get child to identify correct vs reversed letter (awareness)

Copying
- Read / say each word out loud while copying
- Check that the order is correct
- Highlight key words / phrases / numbers as a reference
- Understand and remember the entire sentence

38
Q

What are the 3 phases of learning a new motor skill in the Acquisitional / Motor Learning

A
  1. Cognitive phase - attempting to understand the demands of the handwriting task (visual control of fine motor movement is important)
  2. Associative phase - child has learnt the fundamentals of performing handwriting and continues to adjust and refine (proprioceptive and kinaesthetic feedback is important, reliance on visual cues decrease)
  3. Autonomous phase - child can perform the handwriting automatically with minimal conscious attention
39
Q

What are some instructional approaches for handwriting intervention programs?

A
  • Modelling
  • Copying
  • Stimulus fading
  • Composing
  • Self-monitoring
40
Q

What are the models of practice to guide handwriting intervention?

A
  1. Acquisitional / Motor Learning
  2. Sensorimotor
  3. Biomechanical
41
Q

What are the signs that tell when a student should change their grip?

A
  • Muscular tension & fatigue (aka. Writer’s Cramp)
  • Poor letter formation / writing speed
  • Tightly closed web space that limits controlled precision finger and thumb movements
  • Holding the pencil with too much pressure or exert too much force
42
Q

What are some compensatory activities for students with cognitive limitations that affect attention?

A
  • Placing a black mat under the sheet of paper to increase high contrast
  • Reorganizing worksheets
  • Drawing lines to group materials
  • Covering entire page except the activity on which the student is working on
  • Cueing child to important visual information
43
Q

What are some intervention strategies that can help with distractibility?

A
  • Self-monitoring the tendency to be distracted
  • Attending to the whole situation before attending to parts
  • Taking time out from tasks
  • Searching the whole scene before responding
44
Q

What are some handwriting assessment tools to measure handwriting?

A
  • Evaluation Tool for Children’s Handwriting (ETCA)
  • Test of Handwriting Skills