Handwriting and Special Needs

One of our biggest challenges this school year has started… handwriting! My son is having a very difficult time forming letters. Forming letters can be difficult for special needs children for many reasons:

1.     It requires coordination

2.     It requires muscle control for body position and grip to write letters

3.     It requires correct grip

4.     It requires visual and spatial processing

5.     It requires memory and a mental picture of the upper and lower case letters

6.     It requires crossing midline

7.     It requires endurance

To help my son improve his handwriting, we continue to work on crossing midline (I have blogged about those exercises before).  But after looking at the list of challenges above, I know I need to do more. Today at therapy, I was introduced to an amazing program that has been known to help special needs children with: body awareness, drawing, pre-writing, counting, building, sequential order, coordination, visual processing, memory, and social skills. The program is called “Handwriting without Tears” and is for children in pre- kindergarten through fifth grade. You can visit their website to learn more about what they offer for your child’s age group. For my son, I ordered Mat Man. He is a man you create with your child using different kinds of lines (straight and curved). The same lines can also be used to form letters. I love that this is a kinesthetic activity that also involves visual and auditory learning. I can’t wait to blog about our progress! If you have used this program before, what did you think?