Improve Handwriting

How to improve handwriting

Many parents would like to improve the handwriting of their children. A misconception is that fine motor skills is the only reason that their child’s handwriting is not neat. However there are many other foundations that have to be strong and "ready" for a child to be able to write neatly.

Fine-Motor Skills

Yes, the strength of the child’s fore-arms, the way the hand grips the pencil, and the ability to control the tightness and weight of the pencil while writing on paper does influence a child’s handwriting.

Gross-Motor Skills

Gross motor skills include a child’s ability to hold a good, steady posture while writing. Power comes from the base of the chair, through their stomach, back, shoulder and arms to hold the hand steady while writing. If this skill is weak they may get tired quickly or shift their posture often. This leads to inconsistent handwriting and inability to focus their full energy on writing.

Vision Processing And Ocular Control

Eye muscles must hold the eye-balls steady while the brain has to process what the eyes see and transfer this information to the fingertips to control the pencil movement. Vision processing must be developed at the same time as fine-motor function, because the brain has to process light information from the eyes and tell the hand where to move the pencil-tip. This requires continuous processing while writing.

Sensory-Integration

All our fun exercises train multiple skills at the same time, this is important especially while writing as the brain has to divide limited processing power into many sub-tasks. The ability to control multiple systems at the same time is one of the core benefits of our training and increases processing efficiency that help with improved handwriting. Not only does the brain have to expand energy to control the physical body, a child also has to think about what they have to write. All these systems must work together in harmony in order to improve handwriting.