Mary Kostka coaches on helping children with dysgraphia through short practice sessions, one or two targets at a time, and celebration over criticism. Keep sessions under 10 minutes, protect their self-esteem, and skip the overwhelming feedback.
Hello. Hi everyone. Mary Koska here with Ohana ot and this is our handwriting Success coaching program. I'm going to go over some do's and don'ts that will help you along the way. So the biggest do is to be really, really patient and appreciate that it's an enormous effort to improve handwriting and it's very much tied to their self image and their self esteem. So you really have to tread lightly. That's why you get a lot of really big emotional reactions about not wanting to work on their handwriting. So you don't want to punish and put too much pressure on them and you don't want to rush them. You want to, you do want to take breaks and do the different activities that I've given in really short increments. You really shouldn't ever sit down for more than 10 minutes at a time working on these things. And you want to just pick one or two things to work on at a time. Don't give them too much feedback. If you're having them right and you're like, well, it's not on the line and there's no spaces and the letters aren't formed correctly and it's too overwhelming. So the best thing to do is just to pick one thing. And that comes more in the second and third modules, some of those types of things. With this first module, the body position thing. The body position, there's things that you can do like some exercises for the reflexes. So pick one to do and, and do a little celebration or reward when they've accomplished whatever that you're asking them to do. So you could make a check off sheet. If you do this exercise on 30 different days or 20 different times, then we get to do something special. And like I said, the big thing is just be really patient and understand the complexity of. It takes a lot of repetition to learn to improve any kind of motor skill. And handwriting is a really complex motor skill. So you really want to tread lightly, respect their self esteem, don't give them too much feedback or too much to do at one time. When you look at the different things in the these three modules, something will jump out at you like oh gosh, they have such a hard time sitting still. Then tackle that first and just tackle the one thing at a time and skip over the ones that aren't problems. If you don't see them having a problem bending their, they are not bending their wrist, then skip over that. You don't need to work on anything to have their wrist in the right position. If it's not already in the right position. So be patient, celebrate the successes and enjoy Aloha.
