My husband and I joke that if he would have had occupational therapy when he was a child, his self-proclaimed “bad handwriting” would be better. When our son began formally learning how to write the alphabet in kindergarten, I wanted to help provide the best instruction. I talked with educators and occupational therapists, attended a Learning Without Tears continuing education course, and bought a bunch of handwriting workbooks. I was determined not to be the cobbler whose children went without shoes.
I noticed that all of the instruction workbooks, teachers, and occupational therapists urged young writers to start generating each letter at its apex. My son often wanted to start letters at the base, and I wondered if it mattered. Will starting a letter at the top rather than the bottom significantly improve handwriting legibility and speed?
The summer after my son’s kindergarten year, I was enrolled in the NYU course, Developing a Guideline for Intervention. It was a memorable semester. The class was small; five students on a Zoom screen arranged like the Brady Bunch, only fewer windows. For the course, we were asked to consider an enigmatic problem that we saw in our practices. Working in a skilled nursing facility, I could have considered fall prevention (or something similarly relevant) for an enigmatic problem, but I wanted to start my dive into pediatric practice. So, I spoke with my professor, Jim Hinojosa, on the phone and let him know my concerns and proposed the enigmatic problem I noticed with my son’s handwriting. Jim agreed that it was the right direction to go and encouraged me to dive in.
This was the summer that I began exploring handwriting in earnest. I soon realized that there is sea of research that has been published on handwriting. I recall diligently searching for research confirming the efficacy of initiating a letter at its apex. What I found was a plentiful amount of research on the importance of handwriting acquisition, handwriting evaluations, and handwriting interventions. But it took a deeper dive into the murkier waters (of the 1970s) to find a seminal paper that explores the graphic behavior of children (Goodnow and Levine, 1973). After discovering this epicenter of research on graphic behavior, I was able to locate offshoots that spanned decades and countries. There has not been much recently published research on graphic behavior (a handful of articles in the past decade), and I never did find any research that looked into the efficacy of initiating a letter at its base. What I have come to believe, based on the research available and motor learning theory, is that the automaticity of handwriting that we aim to acquire, depends on consistently following the same stroke patterns until they become rote. Although the majority of children tend to prefer a downwards and rightwards stroke pattern, there remain those children (possibly due to motor planning or sensory processing differences) that chose to initiate letters at the base, where lined paper provides a built-in visual cue. Perhaps, as therapists and teachers, we should lean into an alternative preference and support this practice for certain students. This is a direction I would like to explore further in the future.
It was not long after I began writing my frame of reference that I realized what I was learning could be developed into a handwriting workbook. In the past, I have fantasized (a time or two) about writing a book. At 10, I recall, I wanted to become the next Judy Blume. I never thought that the first book I would write would be a handwriting workbook, but I am pleased with the development and progression of the Letter-Perfect Handwriting Instruction (L-Phi) workbook.
Although I did not start writing the L-Phi workbook until I had completed all of my courses, I collected valuable ideas and research all along the way. As a product of my education, L-Phi incorporates strength-based practices, evidence-based research, motor learning theory, and the Ecological Model of Occupation. A great deal of deliberation went into developing every detail of L-Phi: from aesthetics, to content, to pacing. For instance, the wording used in the directions for drawing each letter was chosen to be simple, pointed, consistent, and graphic. Letter grouping and sequence is based on the number of strokes and starting points of each letter. Support cues are faded slowly and consistently. The number of trials provided is meant to be ample but not tedious. The colors were chosen because they mimic standard ruled paper. And animals were chosen as drawings because of their neutrality (gender, racial, age) and are not typically associated with the letter (aside from Z for Zebra).
As it turns out, creating the Letter-Perfect Handwriting Instruction workbook, is exactly where my skillset lies. It combines my knowledge of occupational therapy, my love of words, and enjoyment of drawing (and animals). Clearly, L-Phi is the composition I was looking for.
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