Workbooks & Handwriting
In an effort to get the girls working on handwriting skills in a different way I took out worksheets from various workbook types. There is still a lot of control involved in being able to draw circles around and lines to objects and critical thinking at the same time. It is teaching the girls to follow written instructions also which is important.
Above Lily looks for objects on a worksheet using visual discrimination.
Maggie works on her coloring skills.
Lily keeps changing up her pencil grip when left alone to grab her pencil/crayon or writing instrument independently. Quite often she gets it right or corrects herself. With pencils she has the greatest success. But I’ve noticed grading pressure is an issue. Lily writes too softly. I am working on excercises right now with her to help strengthen her grip as an example twisting doorknobs and unscrewing cap bottles. The grip encourages hand muscle strength. She is also using the pull up bar on her blue swing more often which helps also. And squeezing squirt bottles does a great job. I am encouraging right hand use because she seems to favor this hand more & she writes better & independently she chooses this hand most of the time though but she switches sometimes too. We used paintbrush markers for some time which mark very easily that might have contributed to Lily’s soft touch with traditional crayons. She likes writing with chalk too which takes less pressure to make a mark. She is not generalizing different grades of pressure to different writing instruments.
Maggie started out writing the exact opposite. Her difference was she used too much pressure breaking pencil tips and crayons in half. Maggie has learned with painting that the pressure you expert can change the color & she’s just learning to apply this concept to paper & crayons.
The fact that Lily can follow maze lines now with ease means she can follow dotted lines on paper too. The work with be more difficult because it’s finer motor skills which require steadier use of a pencil. I’ll be making up some dotted line sentences this week & printing them out for the girls. Their name for writing practice and maybe select sentences from our Dick and Jane books to practice reading at the same time as writing.
Lily works independently on her curves, tracing lines. This marks a major milestone for her to be able to focus on an entire page and do it all by herself without hand over hand assistance.
We switched the crayon to a pencil because the mark couldn’t be made dark enough with crayon. Once this happened pencil grip improved.
I need to get the girls some shorter pencils. This will self correct the holding of the middle of the pencil.
Maggie chose to work in her handwriting without tears workbook. She loves using the box paper.
Adapting Education 