Friday, May 4, 2012

Occupational therapy for poor handwriting: why it works

Most of our clients come to us to improve some component of handwriting or writing skill.  Parents often question why occupational therapists work with handwriting so much.  Handwriting is a very complicated neurological and anatomical process.  Usually poor or inefficient handwriting or penmanship is simply the symptom of a developmental process that is not functioning smoothly.   When a well trained pediatric occupational therapist evaluates handwriting issues, they should be evaluating specific developmental areas. 

Optimal handwriting skills also require fundamental skills such as:
core strength
sensory processing
fluency praxis
processing speed
trunk stability
bilateral integration
upper body strength
visual motor integration (also known as eye hand coordination)
visual perception (vision to brain processing)
pencil grasp, finger strength and
postural stability

This is why traditional handwriting tutoring by someone other than an occupational therapist may not give your child the improvement that they need.  Once a trained occupational therapist has helped a child to improve these underlying fundamental skill sets, then a child's handwriting will quickly improve. 

3 comments:

  1. This is such a great blog. Handwriting analysis or graphology is the art of interpreting the character form writing of an individual from their handwriting, When you change your handwriting through graphotherapy, you change your brain.
    Handwriting Therapy

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  2. Occupational Therapy (OT) helps people maximize their ability to participate in life. Visit our website for more info.

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