Progress always makes me SMILE!

 

Valentine's Day: Before and After

 

Tiffany's Tips: Writing With Chalk

Chalk can be a precious tool for parents and educators looking to improve children's fine motor skills. Using chalk, children can develop appropriate pencil grasp patterns, improve hand-eye coordination, fine motor control, manipulation, and increase hand strength. This can ultimately lead to improved handwriting, better overall motor skills, and greater success in academic and recreational activities. Additionally, chalk is a low-cost and easily accessible option for those looking to incorporate fine motor skill development into their child's routine.

Tiffany's Tips: Functional Pencil Grip

Does your child hold their pencil when weird pencil grip? They may benefit from using the tripod trainer grip. To...

• Reduce hand fatigue

• Help give more control 

• Encourage tripod pencil grip, the most functional grip for legible handwriting. 

When using pencil grips, have your child start coloring by connecting the dots or mazes activities to get them used to using the grip before handwriting. These will improve your child’s visual motor skills and fine motor skills. When utilizing the pencil grip, you will see your child developing more control of their writing utensil.

 

Tiffany's Tips: My favorite Virtual activity

This is my new favorite online story starter activity. My students love it and I enjoy the fun creative stories they come up with. 

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/story-starters/adventure-writing-prompts/index.html

My Teachers Pay Teachers store

 For all visual perceptual/fine motor/ visual motor things!!! 

Please check it out and follow me:

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Writenow-Ot

Dominoes and Fine Motor Precision

Lining dominos up requires fine motor precision. It also takes eye-hand coordination and visual perceptual skills to properly get the dominos lined up. The fun part is knocking them over.

Playing with dominos is an excellent way to improve a child’s…

 

⇨ Eye-hand coordination

⇨ Fine motor 

⇨ Visual perceptual 

⇨ Crossing midline 

⇨ Upper extremity coordination 

⇨ Fine motor precision

SUMMER is HERE!!!

Summer is HERE!!!! LET'S CELEBRATE!!!

 

Benefits of floor writing

Writing while lying on the floor has many benefits to help improve your child’s handwriting.  This position improves shoulder stability, wrist extension, and forearm placement. Additionally, it may improve your child’s ability to focus by changing their positions.

V a l e n t i n e Day & word spacing

Pipe cleaners, tiny pom-poms, and finger spacers were all used to 

aid my students to correctly spacing their words.

 

Tiffany's Tips: fun core activities

 

Core strengthening does not only happen in therapy or at the gym. Try these fun core exercises for kids... 

⇨ On the playground activities: swinging from the monkey bars, climbing on jungle gym, and swinging (using legs to propel themselves).

⇨ After-school extracurricular activities: yoga, swimming, karate, and bike riding.

⇨ Jumping activities: playing hopscotch, jumping on a trampoline, and jumping rope. 

⇨ At home activities: crab walking, donkey kicks, wheelbarrow walking, and playing while squatting or kneeling.

Summer Virtual Summer Classes

It’s time for students to pick up  a pencil and paper and get ready to enter the school. This summer is the time to help your child refresh or develop the handwriting skills they will need prior to re-entering the school building this Fall. In class, your child will engage in fun hands-on multi-sensory motor activities to learn the fundamentals of …

• writing mechanics (capitalization and punctuation) 

• letter formation, size, and alignment

• word spacing

• pencil grip

From Shaving cream to play-doh, your child will experience the joy of writing. This camp will emphasize letter formation using the Handwriting Without Tears® curriculum for PRINTING or Loops and Other Groups to learn CURSIVE. Our goal is to equip children with the necessary tools to write with CONFIDENCE and EASE.    

DATES: Tuesdays and Thursdays (July 6th to July 29th)

TIMES: 4:30pm to 5:30pm CST

PLACE: Zoom (virtual summer classes are designed to meet your child's needs from the safety and comfort of your home)

Email to register and secure your child’s spot.

For more information contact us at 

writenow.reid@gmail.com 

Tiffany's Tip: Wrist Positioning

Holding your wrist in a slightly extended position pulls the tendons that connect the wrist to the fingers. Therefore, an extended wrist position 

can also move the fingers easier, resulting in better finger control for handwriting.

Try these tips to improve wrist extension when holding a writing utensil…

⇨ rest hand on paper while writing on an easel
⇨ tape mazes and connect the dots activities to refrigerator door to complete
⇨ complete color pattern sheets while lying on the floor prop up on forearms
⇨ wheelbarrow walking, donkey kicks, crab walking
⇨ practicing writing patterns on a vertical surface

⇨ completing written task on a slant board  

April is OT month

 

More Remote Success

The above handwriting samples show an 8-year old boy's progress during remote therapy. 

 

Remote Shoe tying

Teaching shoe tying remotely, required some ingenuity. My client's father converted an amazon box into a training tool. In two zoom sessions, my client moved from the box to tying his own shoelaces independently.  

 

Before and After: Zoom

We have all overcome many challenges and changes in this uncertain world we now live in. Like toilet paper, pencil and paper are rarely seen, making it more and more important to continue the practice of handwriting with my clients. With all these changes, one thing that remains the same, my clients continue to thrive in therapy. They continue to soar beyond my expectations and will enter back in school buildings with better handwriting than before. Don't just take my word for it, you can see the proof for yourself.

The below before and after samples are from an 8-years old boy with Autism.  This progress was made over a 6 month period while on zoom. 

The below before and after samples are from a 7-year old boy who I never met face to face. We worked together via Zoom for FOUR 30 to 40 minute sessions. After 3 sessions, his mom texted me "his handwriting already looks so much better". 

The below before and after samples are from an 8-year old boy with ADHD. This past fall we meet outside for 4 in-person sessions. During these sessions, he was introduced to cursive and learned all the lower case letters.  We resumed therapy via Zoom in January of this year (1st sample).  He is now able to translate print into cursive without a model. As you can see he is very proud of the progress he made in just 3 months.

Thumb Wrap Pencil Grip

 

Does your child wrap their thumb around their pencil when writing or coloring? They may benefit from using the tripod trainer grip. To...

Reduce hand fatigue

Help give more control 

Encourage tripod pencil grip, which is the most functional grip for legible handwriting 

When beginning to use pencil grips to correct this grip, have your child start with coloring by number pictures or mazes to get them used to using the grip prior to handwriting.These will improve your child’s visual motor skills and fine motor skills. When utilizing the pencil grip you will see that your child develops more control of their writing utensil.

Here are two pencil grips I have found great success using...

cross over pencil grip

Summer Camp

As spring comes in, I have begun my plans for the 2010 WriteNow's Handwriting Summer camp.  I plan on offering two camps, a one week camp geared to solidifying correct letter formation, while working on speed and accuracy.  To help with motivation the wii will be utilized to improve eye-hand coordination while providing a reward system.  I also plan on offering a camp to teach new skills to kids who want to get a jumpstart on the handwriting for the next school. If these camps or individual sessions are in your plans for the summer please contact me, as I currently am in the process of picking dates and times for the camps. Currently camps are scheduled for mid July and early August with a free review day the week before school starts.  Looking forward to talking with both old and new clients regarding summer sessions.