Dena: Good morning, everyone. I am excited to talk about the importance of penmanship. Occupational therapists can be huge advocates for penmanship. After this course, I want you to be able to identify the physical aspects and prerequisite skills for handwriting success and we are briefly going to look through different handwriting programs. This is an introductory course, so I am not going to dive too deep into these, but give you some direction to further your research for programs that you may want to use with your students. We are going to recognize modifications, and adaptations, and some fine motor activities that you can use in the classrooms that are academic related and can work on those foundational skills for handwriting.
History of Handwriting
Here is a brief history of handwriting (http://www.history.com/news/a-brief-history-of-penmanship-on-national-handwriting-day). The Romans were the first to use printing, and we still use Roman numerals today. By the 1700s, elegant handwriting emerged as a status symbol and schools began teaching penmanship. Then, in the infancy of the United States, penmanship styles became associated with various professions. Women and men were expected to have a different script and stick to it. In the 1800s, a bookkeeper named Platt Rodgers Spencer attempted to democratize American penmanship. He created cursive writing. One of the biggest and well-known examples of the Spencerian method of writing is on our Coca-Cola bottles. That Coca-Cola sign is actually written in Spencerian method. He also said that he developed the script along the lines of the beauty of God and nature mimicking the rolling hills and puffy clouds.
By the early 1900s, Austin Palmer replaced Spencerian with a type of writing that then became what we know as D'Nealian. We will look at D'Nealian a little later in this presentation. Charles Zaner and Elmer Bloser developed a style that has been in textbooks since much of the 20th century. It is called the Zaner-Bloser method. By the 1980s, schools began to eliminate penmanship classes due to the typewriters and word processors. Interestingly, Europe is still giving rigorous daily handwriting instruction. Of the 50 states, 41 no longer require handwriting instruction. We are spending less time teaching handwriting in the classrooms, but we are expecting our children to write more in the classroom. We will explore this a little bit later. In 1955, the Saturday Evening Post dubbed the United States as a nation of scrawlers, and studies have shown that penmanship abilities have largely declined since then.
Penmanship Vs. Writing
Next, let's talk about the different vocabulary as it pertains to IEP goals. Penmanship is the art of skill of writing by hand. Penmanship is handwriting, print, and manuscript. This includes letter formation, letter spacing, position of letters on line, and spacing between words. Writing is the actual skill of marking coherent words on paper and composing text. With writing, we are talking about generating ideation, sentence structure, capitalization, and punctuation. Many times on IEPs, the teacher will write a writing goal for a student, such as: "The student will write a five sentence paragraph using correct letter formation, spacing, positioning on line, capitalization, and punctuation." Occupational therapists are naturally a part of that goal. For example, I am very specific in my IEP meetings to differentiate between penmanship and writing because I do not want to be responsible to collect data on the actual ideation, sentence structure, and the composition of the text. I feel like that is more of the teacher's skill level and not so much ours as OTs. We assess the planning and editing, letter formation, and all of the handwriting and penmanship portions of it. I might change the goal to say, "The student will write five sentences using correct letter formation, spacing, the letter positioning on the lines."
The Value of Handwriting
When you work with teachers and administrators, a lot of times it is having that rapport to show them our beliefs and why we feel this is important. Many of you have handwriting instruction in your classrooms, but for those that do not, or those teachers that just do not get why we have to teach handwriting, I wanted to give you some pointers to say this is why.
1. Good handwriting leads to stronger academic performance.
Handwriting leads to stronger academic performance. A studied published in the Journal of Early Childhood Education looked at 1,000 students in pre-K, and then later followed them in second grade. What they have found was that the students with good fine motor skills from handwriting instruction and practice daily outperformed their peers in both reading and math in second grade. I think that is huge. There are numerous studies like this out here. This is just one example to show you that there is a direct correlation between handwriting, not typing, to reading and math scores.
2. Handwriting boosts memory.
It also boosts memory. Another study says that longhand note takers engage in more cognitive processing than laptop note takers because they are able to select the important information from the notes to then be able to study them more efficiently.
3. Handwriting correlates with a greater density of brain cells, which promotes higher ability for phonological decoding and writing is more meaningful.
There was another study done that used brain scans to look at the area of the brain when students were handwriting and typing. It showed that the area of the brain that lit up during handwriting was the same area of the brain that adults use for higher-level thinking. That area of the brain was not stimulated during typing.
4. Writing is a part of our daily lives.
Even with the use of iPhones or other devices that offer alternative methods of taking notes, making lists, reminders, etc., there are still parts of our daily lives where we have to write.
5. Good handwriting helps students focus, and may be the key to improving academic skills long term.
These are five key points that I pulled from this article that you can use for those naysayers that say, "We need to move towards technology, not handwriting." Here are some points to come back to and show why that is not the case.
I wanted to introduce you to Anaya Ellick in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Zaner-Bloser contest winner.
She is the 2016 National Zaner-Bloser Handwriting Contest Winner. They looked at only handwriting samples. They did not see the students actually performing the handwriting skill. Isn't it interesting that this little girl has no hands, yet she is the 2016 Handwriting Contest Winner? It goes to show that no matter what the difficulty is, kids can do this.
Why Are We Seeing Handwriting Problems?
There are several reasons that handwriting problems exist (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Barriers to handwriting.
It goes back to the very beginning, and when the Back to Sleep Program started. Babies are no longer in prone. They are not pushing up and getting that good neck, and shoulder, and core strength. Babies are not being held as often. We now have swings, bouncy seats, carriers, and the like. Babies are on their backs most of the day with limited tummy time. With technological advances, there is too much passive entertainment options, like video games and TV. We are also pushing too much, too soon with programs such as My Baby Can Read programs. For example, they are now starting reading in pre-K. My daughter just graduated from pre-K, and she is reading simple books like Hop on Pop. This is not stuff that I have been working on with her, but she is getting it in the classroom. I feel like some kids might be ready for this, but I do not know if we should be pushing it on to all of our students, especially those that may have developmental delays, or are in that high-risk area. There are also many environmental changes like on our playgrounds. We are not seeing a lot of swings or spinning apparatuses anymore. We see a lot of climbing equipment, but this equipment only challenges the child one plane and not in three-dimensional planes. Today, there is limited outdoor play in neighborhoods. When I was a kid, my mom said, "Go play outside!" Now, kids are in scheduled activities such as dance, soccer, gymnastics, and piano lessons. There is not enough time spent in unstructured play nowadays. Finally, there are challenges in the curriculum. Some schools have no formal handwriting instruction. In some districts, pre-schools not mandatory. The increase in technology in the classroom and budget cuts for education have limited handwriting.
The "Write" Time
Prior to Common Core, which started in 2009, 30% of a child's day was spent utilizing fine motor skills, with handwriting accounting for the majority of the time. A 2013 survey for kindergarten through fifth, teachers concluded that elementary students spend over 58% of their time in handwriting work. That is almost double. In my county, students have to do reports on artists in art class and on composers and musicians in music class. We are having them write more, not just in reading or writing classes. Even in math, they have to write a paragraph to explain how they answered the math problem as part of the Common Core curriculum. We are putting handwriting into every single part of their day, but we are eliminating the fine motor activities that develop those muscles in order to accomplish this. To me, we are running the risk of burning our kids out and setting them up for failure. That is my soapbox. Additionally, according to research, children are not developmentally ready for handwriting instruction until the second half of kindergarten (Weil & Amundson, 1994). I will explain why in a little bit. In my school district, by the second half of the school year, the kindergartners are working on four to eight sentences to meet Common Core standards in FL. They are called The Sunshine State Standards as they have adapted them a little bit. Yet our research is showing that we are not really ready until the second half of kindergarten to even start handwriting instruction.
Penmanship and Common Core
Figure 3 shows Common Core standard for writing.
Figure 3. Common Core standards for writing.
Writing 3.6 states, "With guidance and support from adults, students will use technology to produce and publish writing (using keyboarding skills) as well as interact and collaborate with others." This is a standard that talks about using technology and typing. There is no other writing standard that shows that handwriting is just as important. This is what the government standards are for our students, but yet all the research states how technology does not produce the same cognitive abilities as handwriting.
Printing Prerequisite Skills
What are the prerequisite skills for handwriting?
- Postural control and small muscle development
- Eye-hand coordination
- Visual discrimination skills
- Recognize letters of the alphabet
- Understands spatial language vocabulary
- Have basic stroke formation and functional tool use (i.e... scissors, pencil)
- Good attention and memory skills
- Able to follow verbal directions
Postural control, small muscle development, eye-hand coordination, and visual discrimination are important. Many kids cannot recognize or sequence the letters of the alphabet correctly. When called out randomly, they cannot reproduce that letter on paper. We need to make sure that the kids can recognize letters before we begin an evaluation. In the handouts, I have included one called, "When should I call the occupational therapist?" I adapted this from something I found online, and it is a good reference to hand to teachers. It gives some ideas and if those do not work, it recommends contacting OT for an evaluation. It is a great cheat sheet for teachers. I would highly recommend printing that out.
The other thing we need to understand is spatial language vocabulary. Many speech therapists can tell you about this. The kids need to understand positional words. For example, I told a child once to write their name at the top of the paper, and he wrote his name write in the middle of the paper. When I asked him where the top of the paper was, he said, "Well, it is here because the bottom is touching the table." He did not understand that the top meant the vertical top of the paper, not just the front sheet of the paper. Having basic stroke formation and functional tool use are essential. Scissors are starting to disappear from our classrooms. Many administrators are telling teachers that they do not need to use scissors in kindergarten because it is not academically rigorous. Rigor is a big word here in Florida. They are saying that we are spending too much time cutting and not enough writing. This is absurd because properly holding scissors works on strengthening the muscles for a tripod grasp. We also need good attention and memory skills. Many times kids with a diagnosis of ADHD have atrocious handwriting, and when they get on a medication that works for them, almost over night their handwriting improves. Finally, they have to have the ability to follow verbal directions.
Understanding Written Language
Let's now talk about written language and prepositional concepts utilized in during writing instruction (see Figure 4).
Figure 4. Language and prepositional concepts.
Look at the second point. It is not until six years old that most kids understand right, left, and below. So when you are saying, "Write above, write below, or go to the right-hand side of the paper," they may not understand what you mean. It has nothing to do with handwriting, but more to do with written language. We need to teach these concepts before we teach handwriting.
Positional Word and Pre-Writing
There are some activities that you can do to help with positional words. When a student is transitioning between activities, entering a room, or exiting, you can have the student touch the right or left side of their bodies. You can have them write a letter in the air with their right hand or with their left hand. We can work on these activities during their academic tasks. When they are doing worksheets, instead of just circling an answer, we can assign a shape and designate where it should go. "Draw a triangle above the correct answer," or "Draw a rectangle below the answer."
Physical Aspects of Penmanship
Handwriting utilizes many physical aspects:
- Back
- Shoulders
- Core
- Arms
- Wrist
- Fingers
You can incorporate all of these movements prior to writing tasks.
Traditional Seating at Table
Why is seating so important? One of my pet peeves is walking into a classroom and seeing kindergartners with their feet swinging because they do not touch the floor, the table is above their breast level/mid-sternum, and they have 90-degree shoulder flexion to keep their hands on the table. With the table so high, their visual field changes and how they perceive their schoolwork. Administrators want to have all the desks at the same height for aesthetic purposes.
