A short instructional video by Mary Koska (Ohana Occupational Therapy) focused on improving handwriting speed. It outlines practice drills (timed sentence writing, writing with eyes closed, motor-pattern exercises like "Calorbics"), playful motivators (music, games), and classroom/home accommodations (504 plans, scribes, note copies, shortened assignments, extra time, and keyboarding) to help children and adults manage slow or labored handwriting.
Aloha. Mary Koska, here with Ohana Occupational Therapy. And we are in our how to Improve Handwriting course. This lesson is all about how to improve speed, which is a big problem. A lot of people are just not able to keep up. Whether it's your college notes, writing at work, kids trying to keep up in the classroom. Speed is a big concern. Sometimes the speed is slowed down because of things like we talked about earlier, like a tight grip, core strength, positioning. But these are some ideas on how to deal with speed. So one of the things that you can do is just practice writing faster. So pick a sentence or two and time it and see how fast you can write it and it still be neat. And then see if you can beat your time. Beat your time, beat your time. And that's kind of a fun game that kids enjoy doing. And then another thing I talked about it a little bit earlier is kind of over learning it and being able to do it with your eyes closed because you want to get. The speed comes with it being more automatic, so more automatic if you don't have to think about how to form the letters. So being able to write with your eyes closed is another way. So that's kind of a fun game. See how fast you can write it, then see if you can write it with your eyes closed. And then see if you can write it faster with your eyes closed and still be able to read it when you're done. And that's usually pretty fun for kids to do that game. Adding like an upbeat music can help. A lot of times we just need to accommodate and just make it easier for kids to be successful, because if they're really struggling and we just aren't able to get the speed up, we need to make it so they can be successful. Accommodations can be in the form of a 504. You can have a scribe for your child so they can say what their thoughts are. It can be written down. And you can do this at home, too. Have them say they're telling a story and you write down their story, and then you have them copy what you wrote so it breaks down the steps a little bit. You can also have them just tell their story into a tape recorder and then. Tape recorder. I'm dating myself. I am 52. Let's see, we have recorders on our smartphones. Do it on there. So they can do it on the. They can record their ideas and then listen to their ideas and then write it down. I mentioned before, the Calorbics program is kind of helpful sometimes. It's just a motor speed coordination thing. So just doing, not having to think about the letters, but just doing some movement patterns, writing movement patterns to the music can help increase speed. The warm up song that I mentioned before is another good one. Another accommodation that's great is to have to be able to get a copy of the notes from the teacher or from a peer from another student and then they can write some things from those notes, use a highlighter on those notes. But sometimes we just need to accommodate that speed problem. Learning some good note taking skills, not writing down every little thing but just keywords is a skill that can be taught to help with when speed is difficult. And I forgot to turn off my notifications. So let's see what else we have. Shorten the assignments so that they can keep up. Allow, allow. Less volume is helpful. Allowing extra time is a great accommodation so they don't feel so much pressure. And lastly, keyboarding. You know, we're all declining in our handwriting skills because we're not doing it as much. It's a motor skill. When you don't use your motor skills, if you're a runner and you don't run for a couple months, you're not going to be very good at it. You're going to be slow, it's going to hurt. Same with our fingers. If we're not writing a lot, we get sore, we get slow, we get cramped. So the more we do it, the better we are. My handwriting has declined a lot because I simply don't do it a lot anymore. I'm doing all my reports are typewritten. My daily notes, I still write by hand, but sometimes I'm in a hurry so they're not. So they don't look as good. And I need to take my time to do a better job. So my staff are happier with me and they can read. But, you know, the less we do it, it's not going to be a very good skill. And it's a real challenge today because our kids are not getting the motor skill practice in school that they used to get because there's just more that's being taught. So they're having to spend, and they're even taking tests, standardized tests on computers now. So it's a real challenge. If you think back, I think back to like my mom's generation and most people in that generation had beautiful, beautiful handwriting, but they spent an hour at least doing every day doing those handwriting practice sheets and really developing that motor skill. And so we kind of, we're kind of in a challenging time with our technology. So those are just some thoughts about. About speed and things that you can do to improve it, accommodate for it. And that is what I have for speed for you today. Aloha. And I'll see you in the next video.
