Brief instructional video by Mary Koska (Ohana OT) explaining why wrist extension matters for handwriting and demonstrating three practical solutions: 1) stabilize the forearm/wrist (hold arm down or use a bean bag), 2) use vertical surfaces (drawing/painting on wall or chalkboard) to encourage wrist extension, and 3) use an angled/slant board or slanted desk to position the wrist. Emphasizes that an extended wrist enables freer finger movements needed to push, pull, and turn a pen/pencil.
Aloha. Mary Koska here with Ohana OT and our how to Improve Handwriting course. This lesson is all about the wrist and how important the wrist position is to be able to write well. So let's get started. If your wrist is not extended when you're writing, it's very difficult to move the fingers freely. And you can try this on yourself right now. If you bend the wrist and move your fingers. And now extend your wrist back and feel how easy it is to move your fingers. And when you're writing, that's what you're doing. You're moving your fingers to push, pull, and turn the pen and pencil all around. Three easy solutions to problems when the wrist is not being held in an extended position while you're writing. The first one is simply to, you can do this for yourself or your child, or you can have them do it. But if the wrist tends to want to pop up while they're writing, move this out of the way here. So it tends to want to pop up off the table surface while they're writing. You can just. You can use a bean bag, too, but you can just hold the arm down or have them hold the arm down, and that helps get the wrist back in the right position. Another really great thing to do, especially when kids are learning the classic painting at the easel. Taping butcher paper to the wall. Having them draw on the wall is one of the best ways to develop getting your wrist back, because it's very natural to pull your wrist back when you're on a vertical surface. And for that reason, I love chalkboards. You can make your own chalkboard with a piece of wood, and they have roll on and spray chalkboard paint now. So it's really easy to do. You can do it on a door. You can also use just a whiteboard. The reason that I love chalkboards though, is because it provides some resistance and builds a little bit of strength. But any kind of vertical surface, you can have them take a paintbrush and paint water on the wall outside. Another solution to help with this wrist position is to use a slant board. You can get them commercially, but you can also use a notebook. The nice thing about the commercial ones is they work like a clipboard. They'll have a little clip on there, and it's almost the same idea as having a vertical surface, only it's an angled surface and it just naturally gets the wrist up a nice position. And if you remember, the school desk from back in the day used to actually always be slanted. The ones that you could pop open the top and have your stuff inside. And when my kids were little, I picked one of those up at a yard sale or something, and I loved it. That's actually where I had them do their homework because it was such a nice position for them to work in. So just to review, having the wrist extended back is really, really important to be able to move the fingers freely in order to form the letter as well. Thank you. Mahalo.
