Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion fine motor skills - suggestions?

I guess it's a fairly familiar story - grade-skipped child struggling with handwriting. But what's the solution? DD has just turned 6 and is in second grade. Is it just time? Is it just practice? Has anyone BTDT and would like to share their story?

jojo

Been there. My DD skipped Kindergarten and her fine motor skills were the last thing to develop. One thing that worked for us was a giant white erase board and multi color dry erase markers. She loves writing and drawing and really likes to leave messages and art work on the board.

The other thing that we tried is writing tablets doing one letter a day. My DD7 goes into 3rd Grade this fall and her 2nd Grade teacher sent home a cursive handwriting book. I watch her make the first letter, and then comment something like, "Great job, but can you make this a little fatter, skinnier, touch this line, etc." as she makes her first two or three letters. Once she gets the hang of it, she does the rest of the page and I tell her to put a star by her best letter.

Don't know if this will work for your daughter, but it is working for us.

The good news is that as your daughter writes more in school, her writing should improve with practice.

My DS just finished a mid-year skip to 2nd and struggled with handwriting. It's now much much better but not fantastic. His teacher just had him write and write and write. She is big on storywriting and would give the kids a prompt and turn them loose with requirements. The repetition helped the most.

We also did a lot of hand work with therapeutic clay and small bead work. I also taught him how to make bread by hand (he loves to cook) and he did a lot of kneading! It helped him hone his skills and strengthen his hand muscles so that he wouldn't complain of being too tired or get cramps.

If you google occupational therapy and handwriting, you'll get a lot of good suggestions. It can all be fun without a therapy feel to it!

One of many reasons why we chose not to let our PS accelerate DS from K into an accelerated 1/2 combo was his fine motor skills. At the time, he was reading far beyond the kids in that class, but he was only 5y2m, and his hand got tired after one or two sentences and it took him longer to write out answers.

One of DS's greatest strengths is creative writing, and he's been frustrated when his ideas flow faster than his hand. He was also frustrated with his higher-level workbooks when we started HSing in Jan, since 3rd/4th/5th grade books require a lot of writing.

Since we started HSing, we made sure he did quite a bit of writing, in addition to HWT, every single day. He also joined a writing workshop that he was excited to write for, and that really got his pencil moving. Within a few months, his writing skills took off, and now he can write a full notebook page (about 3 paragraphs) before he has to take a break. We're seeing it rapidly improve, and he just turned 6 this month.

Our new challenge is that he is moving into a 3rd grade math. One of the 2 programs we use (Rightstart and CalMath) no longer comes with a workbook, and we're concerned that all the problem transcribing onto paper will get tedious for him. We're about to move to the EPGY math program as our RS supplement to help with that.

We're also encouraging him to practice typing on that cute bbc website. We figure that if he can type out some of his stories, it'll be easier for him than trying to write and edit.

For what it's worth, his 3 year old preschool teacher called this out as something to work on way back then. She's the one who recognized his uniqueness and pushed us to get him tested, but warned us that his intellect would be far ahead of his writing ability for many years. She gave us all sorts of fine motor exercise ideas, but I didn't incorporate them nearly as much as I probably should have. I've learned my lesson, and try to do a lot of that more with my toddler now!