How Occupational Therapy helps to improve Handwriting Skill

What is Occupational therapy?

Occupational therapy treatment is based on meaningful activities of daily life such as Activity of daily living skills, self-care skills, education, work, or social interaction in the peer groups.

Occupational therapists enable or encouragements in physical or mental functioning.

Occupational Therapy work on five (5) Domains:- 

• Occupations
• Client Factors
• Performance Skills
• Performance Patterns 
• Contexts and environments

Handwriting skills are under a domain of performance skills by Occupational therapy. Many parents ask how to improve handwriting skills in child, as poor handwriting affects a child’s school or educational performance. 

Basic Elements of Good Handwriting

There are 2 basic elements of good handwriting : 

 1) Pencil grip: Child has to hold their pencil using some grips, allowing for adequate movements at their thumb and finger joints as well as for upper extremity.

 Basically, there are 4 types of pencil grips –

• Dynamic Tripod
• Lateral Tripod
• Dynamic Quadruped
• Lateral Quadruped

2) Motor control: 

• Posture – Correct sitting posture is very important for good handwriting. Keep the feet flat on the floor, back straight, arms resting comfortably on the desk at a 90-degree angle.
  
• Pressure – Check they are pushing down with their pencil using just the right amount of pressure. Signs of too much pressure include very dark writing, heavy indents into the next page, and children’s hands and fingers fatiguing very quickly. If kids aren’t using enough pressure, their writing will often be too light, making it difficult to read.
• Some sensory issues: To encourage them for different senses to touch or hold in hand (tripod grip)

How can Occupational Therapy works on the fine motor?

The occupational therapist makes plans to improve handwriting in children who are suffering from ADHD, Autism, and Learning Disability Childs, sensory process disordered Childs.

Goals to improve Handwriting skills:

  1) To Improve hand dominance

  2) To improve muscle strength of Hand

  3) To Improve Eye-hand Coordination

  4) To improve pacing and timing of tasks

5) To improve proprioception

Some activities are:

• Cutting the paper into small pieces (using Figure-thumb and index)
• Spray painting
• Picking the beads
• Beading /String bead into a thread (Small, Medium and Large Bead)
• cutting and peeling activity
• Grain sorting activity
•  Climbing Activity

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