Improving a Child's Writing Skills for Increased Attention to Academic Activities

Abstract

Children who have difficulty attending to graphomotor tasks may subsequently need remediation of their low-level handwriting skills to help them increase the legibility and speed of their written academic output. This article discusses how to evaluate a child's handwriting skills, including orthographic coding abilities and the ability to keep a student's attention focused on learning legible letter formation, alignment, and spacing. We put forward guidelines for intervention for an occupational therapist and occupational therapy assistant to aid in the child's automatization of these low-level writing skills. Once a child masters basic graphomotor skills, higher-level writing skills may be targeted so that overall academic performance will increase.

Keywords:

• Occupational therapy
• handwriting
• attention to task