Handwriting has always been a necessary part of school life, perhaps a hobby-refining skill and even an art when done in different styles.
Although it might sometimes be taken for granted, handwriting is an advanced fine motor skill which involves:
- Postural control – being able to sit to task and often look up and back to the page for copying.
- Visual motor integration – enabling your hand to do what the eye sees and perceives.
- Sensory integration – knowing the feel and intensity of a grip, also pressure and direction through and over the page. Being able to work within an environment regardless of noise, visual and other distractions. Tolerating the sound of pencil on paper and even the feel of paper!
- Fine motor skill – achieving a functional grip that gives pressure all the way round the pen / pencil shaft for multi-directional force (push and pull and to make those lovely curves).
- Upper limb and shoulder girdle stability – being able to create fluid upper limb movements to support fine motor skills in the hand, movements in the wrist and slight adjustments to work on different surfaces, different positioning, and with different utensils.
- Cognition – understanding why we are writing what we are, retaining the ideas we want to write down when we are busy working out how to write, and remembering all those complicated spellings and grammar!
Things we need to know to make handwriting easier
We learn our skills in the order of gross motor to fine motor movements.
Early drawing should be up high (i.e. easel / paper on the wall) to create whole arm movements. Standing on paper and drawing round our feet also provides this whole motor movement.
Until your child can walk in and out of cones as a gross motor movement – then they cannot yet cross the midline and form the fine motor diverse patterns of letter formation.
Until your child can put their hands out to catch a soft ball (gross motor), then hand-eye coordination will not be sufficient to learn handwriting.
Your child must first have the ability to draw before they can gain the perceptuomotor skills needed to learn handwriting.
Your child needs to have finger opposition (being able to touch thumb to each finger in turn) before they can develop a tripod based grip.
Your child will develop a pencil grip as they refine control. This means that we do not try to teach a tripod-based grip until they are ready for that in terms of forming letters.
It doesn’t matter how we hold a pencil as long as we have force all the way around the shaft making it ‘functional’.
There are lots of ways to record what we know. If handwriting, despite interventions, does not enable the individual to demonstrate their level of knowledge, then we need to look at other strategies so all is not lost.
Please contact Children’s Choice Therapy if you feel your child has difficulties with handwriting. We are here to help you identify and overcome a multitude of challenges your child may be experiencing.