Fine Motor Skills, Live Q&A
Live Q&A with Marga Grey – Handwriting
Why don’t you start with how to know when it’s time to start handwriting practice? We have gotten a lot of questions about how early to start, when to focus on correct pencil grip, etc. Is 4 years old too soon? When’s the right age to pay attention? So, can you start there?
So many kids we see come in for their first assessment due to poor handwriting.
Surprise, the time to start is when the baby starts crawling. Not directly, but indirectly. To be able to do handwriting and hold a pencil correctly, you have to develop quite a number of skills.
When a baby crawls, the position of a flat hand on the floor pushing up is one of the first motor skills that leads to handwriting skills.
After that, the grip of picking up anything they can. It starts with a clumsy big fist grip of toys.
When I get a child with a poor pencil grip, I start with any kind of gripping motions.
For example, chunky sidewalk, pavement chalk like this egg-shaped one, is easy for even a child as young as one year old to grab on and write.
There’s no pressure to correctly form anything. They can just scribble and that’s the first exposure to handwriting.
I’ll share a little secret: my two granddaughters of 9 and 12 years old, both have bad pencil grips and attended therapy for it, but they’ve now won awards for good handwriting. I tell you that to say that nothing is set in concrete.
I don’t want you to think that you have to spend millions of dollars to develop the perfect grip, but it is easier to use proper grip because it prevents fatigue when writing.
So, at what age do we start watching that and phasing into proper grip?
If they develop normally, they’ll phase through it on their own. Just one day their grip will be proper. If they’re not developing normally, then we use exercises like wheelbarrow crawling to simulate the same pressure and motor skill development as crawling. It encourages the right posture.
Then you can do muscle strengthening exercises and using the correct pressure. For example, touching the thumb to each individual finger one at a time. That’s an example of a therapeutic exercise that develops hand muscle tone, grip, and posture.
On screens, children just use one finger to write. Their handwriting may be perfect on an ipad, but I have to tell parents that using one finger is not the same skill, muscle work, and coordination as handwriting on paper.
They have to control paper, their posture, the pressure, the grip, and the movement of the wrist. We don’t want children to have difficulty signing a contract, even if that’s the only thing they ever have to write in the future!
What might the problems be for children who never learn to write properly?
I would love to see the human hand in 2 or 3 thousand years, because I think they’ll look quite different when we develop different muscles from now!
But in all seriousness, there is a lot of research that shows that the mind works differently when you write on paper and take notes on paper versus typing notes on a computer.
You commit things better to memory that way, according to research. You experience feelings and process thoughts and emotions differently when you take the time to write it down, too.
So when the time comes that they need to test or complete assignments in handwriting, a child that must think about each step of the process as an individual step will be worn out quite quickly.
Thinking about the formation of the letter. Thinking about how to move the paper. A weak posture for sitting up straight for a while. Etc. That takes a lot of energy, and they fatigue and give up after one or two sentences.
This is a question that was emailed in from Jana. My son is 7 and has really been struggling with spelling and reading comprehension. His handwriting is HORRIBLE. He has trouble with his spelling words. Even if he knows the words and can spell them aloud to me at home, he will miss a lot of them on the written test at school. It takes him hours to write out a paragraph during reading comprehension assignments. His teacher has been great with special attention so far, but she has suggested it’s time to get him tested for learning disabilities. Where do I even start?
Well, I would go to an OT (occupational therapist) because it’s most probably that he also has problems with visual perception. That’s like reversal of letters. You might not notice the difference between “b” and “d”, or like the word cat and bat might look exactly the same visually. So there are lots of different aspects of visual perception and that will impact letter formation too.
I’ve seen kids that need to write a ‘b’ and they might take an extra millisecond to decide which direction to go, but it takes some energy and the child is exhausted. They don’t want to do it. The effort is too much. It’s not fun.
So, an occupational therapist would do a visual perception test to see if that’s the problem And of course there’s always the posture. Some children can’t sit up straight or sit still for long periods of time and that affects their writing.
Sometimes it’s solved with little movement breaks during class time, such as those used in CoordiKids Classroom course. Those are 5 minute movement breaks to relieve the posture for a moment and then come back to their assignment.
It would be good to have an assessment to see if everything is in place.
Rini has a question: My 5-yea-rold tends to hold a pencil very close to the tip. Is this something I should correct, or will he get it right on his own?
If he uses a lot of pressure, that might be worth looking at. If it’s severe, you can use a pencil grip to develop the proper grip.
I love to use pavement chalk on vertical surface. Or a felt tip pen in which too much pressure will break the tip off, so the child sees “Oh, I’ve pushed too hard.”
Or if they’re older, like 7-8 years old, you can give them a pacer (a mechanical pencil) that lead also breaks easily if they use too much pressure.
Or a thicker pencil, also.
(15:45 – demonstration of different pencil grips)
Link to a great source for various pencil grips:
Suggestion from a Mom: Playing with LEGO is great for building fine motor skills
Absolutely! It’s also very good for proprioception – helping to understand how much pressure to put on something. If you build a wall and want to add a piece, you have to put the right amount of pressure so as to not destroy the wall you’ve already built.
Another option: Theraputty – it’s like playdough but much stronger. So, you place small items mixed into the putty and children have to stretch it and manipulate it to pull the items out, which is great for developing hand strength. (Demonstration at 20:25)
Link to Theraputty and other sensory toys:
You’ve mentioned movement breaks, so are there specific movements that are better than other?
With just a typical movement break in a classroom with typical kids, if it’s very active with music and energetic, about 90% of the kids will be able to get back to work at their desks when it’s over. The 5-10% of kids that end up in OT are the ones who aren’t able to resume work. They are overwhelmed.
They find it very difficult to calm themselves and regulate so that they can resume work.
So, in the CoordiKids Classroom course movement breaks programs, we do the movements very slowly with rhythm. It’s very regulating and helps them focus. If a child doesn’t want to do it, it’s usually because it’s harder to do things slowly or they have more difficulty with slow, deliberate movements.
Would one of the CoordiKids virtual programs be beneficial to parents who are specifically worried about their child’s handwriting?
The CoordiKids Home course program is good for this, as it’s the one you do at home.
First of all, it encourages posture and grip posture, and indirectly visual perception because you’re dealing with right and left and body concept.
It includes fine motor movements, so hand and finger exercises. It also includes eye movements which is the other component that an impact reading and writing.
Sometimes kids fatigue because their eyes get tired, which is because of the eye movements that isn’t well developed, so that’s included in CoordiKids Classroom course. The CoordiKids Course is aimed to develop the whole child well, not to teach one or two skills.