Nurturing Hands, Inspiring Minds, Fostering Fun
WRITE EXPECTATIONS, LLC PROGRAMS
"Nurturing hand & visual motor skills development, unlocking handwriting potential, inspiring young minds, and making learning fun."
Occupational Therapy Evaluation
The evaluation process includes:
- Standardized testing (as appropriate)
- Functional assessment
- Parent/teacher interview
- Written report
- Parent conference to review the report
Occupational Therapy for School-Age Children
Occupational Sessions are:
- Tailored to fit the individual needs of each student
- Develop or enhance your student's fine motor skills, handwriting/keyboarding skills
- Address the underlying skills impacting independence and/or academic performance
- Creatively designed to capture the interest of students while learning important skills
Prewriting Skills | Fine Motor Skill Development
Activities will guide the development of fine motor precision and in-hand manipulation skills in preparation for utensil use and handwriting skills.
These skills include:
- Hand development: Strengthening the small muscles of the hand, developing a pincer grasp, developing hand arches for skilled movement of the fingers, in-hand manipulation
- Bilateral hand skills
- Eye-hand coordination
- Visual perceptual skills: i.e., Visual memory, spatial relationships, visual tracking, visual sequential memory
- Facilitate proper pencil/crayon grasp - utensil control
- Visual motor skills: i.e., Forming prewriting strokes (shapes), tracing, scissor skills
- Primitive Reflex Integration
Handwriting Skill Instruction | Intervention
Certified Handwriting Without Tears® Specialist
- Uses fundamental principles of the Handwriting Without Tears® curriculum
- A multi-sensory approach to letter recognition and beginning capital letter formations
- Individual goals and objectives are established to monitor student progress
- An individualized writing program is developed for each student using innovative and proven strategies to improve handwriting legibility and student written language success
- Students work on proper upper extremity positioning (i.e., body, forearm, wrist, hand), pencil grasp, as well as core stability
- Students will develop visual motor/perceptual skills to increase utensil control and handwriting skill application and accuracy
- The skills addressed to increase handwriting legibility include letter formations, letter placement, letter sizing/consistency, letter spacing, word spacing, and letter control.
Cursive Handwriting
Write Expectations offers cursive writing instruction to learn how to read and write in cursive, to support motor planning and fine motor development, and may be used to support language-based remediation programs. We use a Handwriting Without Tears®-based curriculum. Students learn cursive letter formations, and develop the necessary patterns of pencil strokes, letter connections, and rhythm/fluidity. In addition, basic handwriting skills such as letter placement, word spacing, and letter control will be addressed with students that are ready to write sentences.
Benefits of Cursive Handwriting:
Cursive writing may be considered "a lost art," as most schools have eliminated their cursive writing curriculum. As Suzanne Baruch Asherson wrote in the NY Times article ((2013), "Learning to write in cursive is shown to improve brain development in the areas of thinking, language and working memory. Cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing and typing."
Keyboarding Skills:
- This program benefits student by learning the location of keys, proper finger placement, finger-to-key correlation, and builds muscle memory through the repetition of keystrokes to increase typing proficiency.
- Builds visual memory skill through a visual approach
- Builds finger isolation and coordination to facilitate finger agility and movement across the keys
- Students who experience difficulty with written expression, such as dysgraphia, greatly benefit from this program. These students may require assistive technology to complete written assignments and need to be proficient at typing at an early age.
