Week 5 - Handwriting Flashcards
What is the development of prewriting & handwriting in young children?
- 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
What are the pre-requisite skills for handwriting?
- 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
What are the 6 developmental classification of Benbow?
- Upper extremity support
- Wrist and hand development
- Visual control
- Bilateral integration
- Spatial analysis
- Kinesthesia
What is the age that typical developing children are ready for handwriting instruction?
Latter half of kindergarten school year
How does poor visual-cognitive ability affect handwriting?
- 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
How does poor visual discrimination affects handwriting?
- 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
How does poor visual-spatial problems manifest as?
- 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
What is the pencil grip progression in different age?
- 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)
What is considered mature pencil grips?
- Dynamic tripod grasp
- Lateral tripod
- Dynamic quadrupod
- Lateral quadrupod
What are some ways to analyse a child’s handwriting?
- 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
What are the domains of handwriting?
- 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
What are some ways to improve legibility?
- 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
What are some considerations to take when teaching handwriting?
- 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
What are some activities to improve fine motor control and isolate finger movement?
- 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
What are some activities to promote graphic skills?
- Draw lines & copy shapes using shaving cream, sand or finger paints
- Colouring
- Doing dot-to-dot pictures and mazes
What are some activities that help enhance right-left discrimination?
- Connecting dots on the chalkboard with left-to-right strokes
What are some activities that help improve orientation to printed language?
- Label their drawings based on their description
- Encourage book-making with their favourite topics
- Label common objects in the classroom or at home
What are some compensatory approaches for handwriting intervention?
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
What are some ways to improve spacing between letters?
- Spacing with index finger
- Fingerprint spacing by pressing on a inked before finger spacing
- Teach ‘no touching rule’ of letters
What are some ways to improve spacing between words?
- Use dots or dash (morse code) between words
- Use adhesive strips (post-it) as spacers between words
What are some ways to improve spacing on paper?
- Use grid paper
- Write on every other line of the paper
- Draw coloured lines to mark (green is left, red is right)
What are some ways to improve placing text on lines?
- Using pictorial schemes on writing guidelines
- Provide raised letter lines as tactile cues for letter placement
What are some ways to improve letter and word sizing?
- Individual box for each letter
- Name letters with ascending stems, no stems and descending stems (e.g. sky, tree, soil)
What are some ways to improve near-point copying?
- Highlight text on the worksheet to be copied
- Teach student to copy 2-3 letters at a time
What are some ways to improve far-point copying?
- Enlarge print for better viewing
- Start with copying from nearby vertical models
- Position student to be facing the board
What are some ways to improve dictation?
- Attach letter strip to the table for the student who cannot remember letter forms
- Dictated spelling words to contain some but not all letters
What are some ways to improve composition?
- Provide magnetic words to write short poems or stories
What are some ways to improve speed?
- 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?
What should we observe about SITTING POSTURE and how can we improve it?
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
What should we observe about PAPER ALIGNMENT and how can we improve it?
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
What should we observe about PENCIL GRIPS and how can we improve it?
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
What should we observe about HAND MUSCLES and how can we improve it?
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
What should we observe about FINE MOTOR and how can we improve it?
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
What should we observe about COORDINATION OF 2 HANDS and how can we improve it?
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
What should we observe about MOTOR PLANNING SKILLS and how can we improve it?
Observe
- Clumsy movement
- Use inefficient ways to do things
- Slower in learning letter formation
Ways to improve
- CO-OP (GPDC)
What are the different types of visual perception skills?
- 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
What are some ways to improve visual perception skills?
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
What are the 3 phases of learning a new motor skill in the Acquisitional / Motor Learning
- Cognitive phase - attempting to understand the demands of the handwriting task (visual control of fine motor movement is important)
- 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)
- Autonomous phase - child can perform the handwriting automatically with minimal conscious attention
What are some instructional approaches for handwriting intervention programs?
- Modelling
- Copying
- Stimulus fading
- Composing
- Self-monitoring
What are the models of practice to guide handwriting intervention?
- Acquisitional / Motor Learning
- Sensorimotor
- Biomechanical
What are the signs that tell when a student should change their grip?
- 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
What are some compensatory activities for students with cognitive limitations that affect attention?
- 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
What are some intervention strategies that can help with distractibility?
- 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
What are some handwriting assessment tools to measure handwriting?
- Evaluation Tool for Children’s Handwriting (ETCA)
- Test of Handwriting Skills
