Thursday, January 18, 2007
The Deterioration of Handwriting
In the past week I have been thinking about all of the students who would potentially benefit from using voice recognition due to learning disabilities or fine motor delays. A common discussion among the OTs and myself in my district is how significantly handwriting has deteriorated over the past 10 years or so. Most of the OTs believe that technology is at least partly to blame for the decline in fine motor skills in general as kids just spend too much time in front of a screen and not enough time manipulating toys and other objects. Do we fix a problem that has been caused by technology with more technology? Tough question....plus how do we determine when to intervene with voice recognition? It is not always easy to use voice recognition in a classroom setting without distracting others. Many questions to think about...
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2 comments:
This is such an interesting topic. I have contemplated these questions with my own children. My daughter really struggled in kindergarten to write legably. Her teacher explained to me that she was having difficulty because she did not have fine motor skills. She suggested that I allow her to button and zip her own clothing. I did this for a few weeks-a little frustrated with the amount of time she took to zip up her pants-her progress was amazing. My four year old is obsessed with the computer. He is on it everyday playing games. To me he has more fine motor control then my daughter did at six. I don't think we should discourage kids from using the computer, I believe it is an excellent tool, however I also see in my classroom how the students writing has deteriated. I don't know the answer-when you find out...please share!
I have seen a drastic decline in fine motor skills since I have been working with children in the school setting (19 years now). I believe that in our busy society, our children spend a lot of time strapped into equipment--strollers, backpacks, walkers, swings--and not enough time crawling and developing shoulder girdle strength. Then these children go to preschool and get a writing utensil plopped into their hand--their hands at this point do not have the fine motor control to hold a pencil/crayon properly and they immediately develop bad habits that are really hard to break. The key is to give young children plenty of opportunities to crawl and pick up toys with their hands while in a weight bearing (crawling) position. Also, kids should not be given writing utensils until they are ready to hold them properly..
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