Handwriting problems

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Hi Everyone. I just posted in the parents forum but I thought I would also ask some current students for suggestions. I am the mom of a very smart 5 year old Aspie. He is struggling with handwritng and gets upset when he is forced to practice. He also has problems with zippers, buttons, snaps and tying his shoes. He gets OT but I am worried he is going to have lots of problems in Kindergarten. I am wondering if any of you have writing or fine motor problems and how you deal with them. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Kathy

I most defiantly did, at age 5 I HATED writing and 50 years later I still do. I print in block capitals if there is to be any chance of reading it. I did learn calligraphy in my teens but in that I am concentrating on drawing the shapes of the letters and what I am writing is without meaning.

That said I did eventually master buttons by the age of 8 or 9 and I have good fine motor skills for model making and for the past 35 years been an excellent engineer with a lot of skills that call for fine motor ability.

I think at age 5 far too bigger deal is made of these sort of abilities he will eventually learn them just make sure that buttons are large and easy to use if you can.

I never had major problems with motor skills, but my handwriting has always been terrible. This site helped me out a lot: http://briem.ismennt.is/4/4.1.1a/4.1.1.1.quick.htm

If I write this way now, it's much more legible and faster.

I have never fully commited to a single handwriting style. I will use different styles within the same paragraph (curvey, straight, small, neat, large). I was ashamed of it as a kid, so I never talked about it. It was never brought up by a teacher either. It's as if each type has a personality of its own or like I'm using someone else's hand for one type and someone else's for another type. Each paper I write by hand looks like three or four different people wrote it by hand.

My hand writing is incredibly naff, no matter how hard I try it always looks like a kid has wrote it.

Thanks for the advice and info. I know that handwriting is becoming less and less important in our (almost) paperless society. I guess I just want my son to master the basics-not have beautiful handwrting.

I've never had problems with handwriting. Actually, in my 3rd grade class, I was even the first one to catch onto cursive (back then they said we'd eventually have to use it for everything... ha!).

I actually went to a few years of physical therapy for kids before I even started preschool. I used to have pretty much the exact same problems that you've described your kid to have, but that PT helped me out a lot. Granted, my handwriting still sucks, and I'll never be a surgeon, by my fine motor skills are much, much better. So I'd suggest you check with a PT facility nearby to see if they have or know of anything like this that you could go into. I somehow doubt the treatment I went through was unique, since it was in a town in Wyoming I lived in with a population of around 1,500.

A sensible solution would be to have him type, but you are likely to run into administrative problems when bureaucrats oppose such an idea (I've no idea why they would, but they consistently do).

I've got the worst handwritting in the class.

My handwriting is horrible. The funny thing is that I am really good at calligraphy and forging peoples handwriting.

I had similar problems myself around that age (also according to my school reports). When the teacher tried to get me to write it blocked me.

There are some solutions that can help, but do not expect perfect writing later.

- individual attention: there was a special teacher for me to give me writing lessons and things related to it. Because there were no class mates it was a bit easier to make mistakes
- using little blocks on the pens, these make it easier to hold the pen. Normal pens are a bit small to hold.

Later they found that learning to write perfectly would stay a bother for me and I got an electric typewriter. With a letter from some doctors and that teacher my parents could convince the school-director and later they could convince the government services for education.

When I take a lof of concentration I can write good enough for official forms. My normal writing is just for notes to myself. Luckily most official forms are being phased out for electronic ones.

My handwriting is bad, its better than it used to be, but its still pretty bad, there have been times I couldnt read my own handwriting, and I cant read anything I wrote in say, kindergarden, although my teachers can read my handwriting.

Since I completely forgot I had these before, here's what my handwriting used to look like:



And how it looked a while after switching:



Note that those are roughly to scale with each other. It's matured and gotten a little scribbly since then because I'm able to write faster with it now, but it hasn't lost much readability. And I can squeeze in a little more now than I could at the time when I made these images (a couple years ago, I guess). I've also added hooks to the top of tall letters like h and l, which now bend over like f for a more italic look.

If poor motor skills underlie bad handwriting, it may not ever be possible to write well, and one of the alternatives suggested in this thread should be used. In either case, I definitely recommend handwriting exercises to find out how much improvement is possible. For me it was significant, and I've been able to develop a highly-readable and distinctive style. For others the practice may be more diagnostic (not necessarily in the clinical sense) than functional.