Is Your Child Ready To Write? Building Readiness In The Preschool Child [read]

Is Your Child’s Backpack Causing Back PAIN? [read]

The Journey To Sound [read]

Whatever Happened to Phonics? [read]

When Handwriting Is A Hassle [read]

News Archives

Is Your Child Ready To Write? Building Readiness In The Preschool Child
By: Stacy Thompson, MHS, LOTR

How can you ensure your preschooler is ready for writing instruction in Kindergarten? Start now! You can facilitate your child’s sensory, motor, and cognitive development using fun, preparatory activities at home. The preschool years are a crucial time to develop these prewriting skills.

Like other areas of your child’s development, prewriting skills follow a predictable sequence. In order, the sequence includes scribbling, imitating, and copying. Scribbling allows your child to explore line and movement. Scribbling follows a progression: random marks, horizontal marks, vertical marks, circular marks. Following this phase, your child will begin to imitate. Imitation is when you, the parent, make a mark on the page as your child watches. Your child is then asked to make the same mark you made. Copying is the next skill your child will gain. In copying, your child is asked to make a mark from simply looking at a model or picture. The child is not given the opportunity to watch you create the mark. Wherever your child may be in the sequence (scribbling, copying, imitating), he/she is showing interest in writing and now is the ideal time to lay the foundation for handwriting skills.

Good stability at the shoulder, elbow, forearm, and wrist is critical for optimal control of the fingers during writing. This stability can be fostered in numerous ways. Encourage your child to lie on his/her stomach during play. Preschoolers should use a vertical surface for writing whenever possible (easels and chalkboards). Engage your child in activities involving pouring and scooping. Incorporate these tasks into enjoyable family activities such as baking cookies or decorating cupcakes.

Stimulate a variety of your child’s sensory systems through the use of multi-sensory play. Use visual media, including brightly colored crayons or paper, and write on a variety of surfaces such as shiny foil, a dull paper bag, a dry erase board, etc. Allow your child to experience a variety of textures, such as drawing in lotion, whipped cream, or pudding on top of foil. Also, writing on sandpaper with chalk, drawing in sand, and using a variety of writing tools (finger paint, glitter pens, sidewalk chalk) are useful ideas. Try using scented markers or adding flavoring to edible finger paint. When selecting writing tools, think small. Over-sized crayons may be too large for your child’s small hand and will likely encourage a fisted, whole hand grip. To facilitate the optimal position, provide your child with short crayons, golf pencils, or pieces of chalk for writing.

Handwriting requires the coordination of the left and right sides of the body. Address this by promoting the coordinated use of two hands during play. Ideas include erasing/washing a chalkboard or using a dressing board (buttons, snaps, fasteners). To help your child develop right/left awareness, try playing Twister, Simon Says, or doing the Hokey Pokey. Increase your child’s exposure to printed language by labeling common objects around the house.
Use bold, capital letters. Challenge your child’s eye-hand coordination through ball play. Hand strength can be addressed through crumple art, rolling Play-Doh, using squeeze toys, Lite Brite, etc.

This stage of development is exciting for both you and your child. However, prewriting skills take time to develop. Allow your child the necessary time to refine these prerequisite skills, gain confidence in his/her abilities, and show interest in new writing tasks. Teaching handwriting to a child who is not ready can lead to decreased interest in writing as well as the potential to pick up poor writing habits.

Stacy Thompson is a licensed, registered occupational therapist practicing with her colleagues at ABILITIES. Intensive therapy to address handwriting, fine motor skills, visual skills, self-regulation, and sensory integration is available.

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Is Your Child’s Backpack Causing Back PAIN?
By: Stacy Thompson, MHS, LOTR

Have you noticed that backpacks have become increasingly “packed” these days?
Maybe you have seen a child toting a backpack nearly twice his/her size. Perhaps you have watched your own child attempt to zip a backpack so crammed that the zipper wouldn’t budge.

Every day children carry backpacks loaded with books, binders, supplies, and other items that may create a strain on their growing bodies. “The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated that more than 3,300 children, aged 5-14 years, were treated in emergency rooms for injuries related to backpacks in 1998” (Source: www.aota.org). To educate the public on this growing concern, the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA) has partnered with backpack manufacturer L.L. Bean to promote backpack safety awareness.

The American Occupational Therapy Association provides simple tips to protect your children. Initially, you should determine if your child has backpack-related complaints. Does your child complain of aching shoulders/back, a tingling sensation in the arms, or appear stooped or hunched over at the end of the school day? If so, your child’s backpack may be too heavy or your child may be wearing the backpack improperly. Both can lead to long-term back problems for your child. Even if your child is complaint-free, you may prevent future problems by utilizing the safety recommendations. Your child’s safety can be enhanced by selecting a good backpack, loading the backpack properly, and wearing the backpack correctly. 

It is important to select a pack that is appropriate for your child’s size. Look for a backpack with padded shoulder straps. This will ensure that the blood vessels in the neck and shoulders are protected to prevent tingling in neck, arms, and hands. Look for a backpack with a waist belt. If your child’s pack has a waist belt, be sure to use it. This device helps to more evenly distribute the weight of the backpack.  If your child may be walking after dark, AOTA recommends purchasing a backpack with reflective trim on the straps for increased visibility and safety.

It is recommended that a child never carry more than 15% of his/her body weight in the backpack, i.e. if your child weighs 100 pounds, the backpack should not exceed 15 pounds. When placing your child’s items inside, place the largest or heaviest items closest to your

child’s back. Try to pack items neatly to avoid unnecessary weight shift.  If your child packs his own backpack, demonstrate these techniques and encourage your child to use them when loading the backpack at school. Advise your child to bring home only necessary items. If the number of items in your child’s backpack cannot be decreased, consider a rolling backpack.

Advise your child to use the smaller compartments on the front of the backpack for pens and pencils. Many of these compartments have built-in holders for writing tools. Have small children keep these items in plastic pen/pencil boxes. Loose pens and pencils in the main compartment of the backpack may cause injury to your child as he/she reaches into the pack to obtain an item. 

It is important that your child wear both shoulder straps of the backpack to distribute the weight evenly across the shoulders and back.  Avoid shoulder straps that are so loose the backpack literally hangs away from the child. Straps should be snug enough to place the backpack close to your child’s back. There should not be a large gap between the top of the backpack and your child’s back. The bottom of the pack should not rest more than four inches below your child’s waist. If your child’s backpack rests this low, it may be too big for your child. Ideally, the backpack should rest on the curve of your child’s lower back.

If you have further concerns about backpack safety or other concerns related to your child’s development, consult a pediatric occupational therapist. People of all ages who have health problems benefit from occupational therapy to improve skills needed to perform everyday activities or "occupations" at school, home, or work.

Stacy Thompson is an occupational therapist in Baton Rouge practicing, along with her colleagues, at ABILITIES. Intensive therapy for handwriting, motor skills (balance, coordination, hand skills), and self-help (feeding, dressing) is offered on a regular basis.

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The Journey to Sound
By: Margaret Cain-Miracle, M.A. CCC-SLP, Certified AVT

In the past few years, infant hearing screenings have been completed on new babies in hospital nurseries across the country. These screenings have allowed for the identification of children who are deaf or hard of hearing at much younger ages. These infants and small children are also getting hearing aids and cochlear implants earlier allowing them to hear sound as never before. The journey begins with their first detection of sound.

Many children who are deaf or hard of hearing and their families are using an Auditory-Verbal Philosophy as the road map on their journey. The philosophy is a set of guiding principals to help children use even small amounts of amplified residual hearing to learn to listen and speak.

The principles of auditory-verbal practice are in a position statement from Auditory-Verbal International, Inc. and explained further in The Listener, Auditory-Verbal Practice by Warren Estabrooks. They are as follows:

• To detect hearing impairment as early as possible through screening programs, ideally in the newborn nursery and throughout childhood.
The earlier that a child’s hearing loss is detected the better because time without the ability to hear or compromised hearing cause’s delays in the understanding and use of speech.

• To provide the earliest and most appropriate use of medical and amplification technology to achieve the maximum benefits available.
In auditory-verbal therapy, it is critical that hearing aids and cochlear implants be functioning appropriately to give the child as much access to speech sounds as possible.

• To guide, counsel and support parents and caregivers as the primary models for spoken language development and to help them understand the impact of deafness and impaired hearing on the entire family.
Auditory-Verbal sessions are completed in a parent participation format, as the parents are the child’s primary language models. The therapist guides the parents on new goals and how to make them meaningful and fun while incorporating them into daily activities at home.

• To help children integrate listening into their development of communication and social skills.
We work together to meet the foal of encouraging the child to use listening and speaking to communicate with ALL people in their environment.

• To support children’s auditory-verbal development through one-to-one teaching.
One-to-one teaching is used to help parent’s develop the skills they need as their child’s primary language model and to help the children develop their listening and speaking skills. Each family is different so the individual sessions allow for differences while promoting individual strengths.

• To help children monitor their own voices and the voices of others in order to enhance the intelligibility of their spoken language.
The children need lots of practice to develop the auditory feedback loop, which is what allows all of us to monitor our own speech production. If they learn to do so, they will be able to produce intelligible speech with a pleasant sounding voice.

• To use developmental patterns of listening, language, speech, and cognition to stimulate natural communication.
The natural developmental patterns of listening, speech, language, cognition and communication development are used in auditory-verbal therapy. These patterns are used to plan goals that are then integrated into fun and natural activities for carryover at home.

• To continuously assess and evaluate children’s development in the above areas and through diagnostic intervention, modify the program when needed.
The auditory-verbal therapist is constantly evaluating where a child is performing day-to-day and week-to-week and the goals are adjusted to meet the child’s and family’s needs.

• To provide support services to facilitate children’s educational and social inclusion in regular classes.
One of the main goals of auditory-verbal therapy is the successful inclusion of the child in a regular classroom environment. Auditory-verbal therapists are a part of the team of support services needed to make the children successful.

Everyone who knows or loves a child with a hearing loss needs to be aware of the Auditory-Verbal Philosophy. The certified auditory-verbal therapist is the guide along the exciting journey to sound.

Margaret Cain-Miracle, M.A. CCC-SLP, Certified AVT is a licensed and certified speech-language pathologist and a certified auditory-verbal therapist. She is practicing with speech therapists and occupational therapists at Abilities in Baton Rouge.

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Whatever Happened to Phonics?
By: Judy N. Moock M.A., CCC-SLP

Can you remember the Dick and Jane series of your early school years? If so, you probably learned to read during the 1960’s and may recall that reading instruction was based on learning the sounds and syllables of English language structure, or “phonics”. Teaching methods develop and evolve as research and advances in technology identify the need for more efficient strategies in education. During the 1970’s, the trend in teaching reading turned toward a whole-language approach, using the literary context of stories and poetry to facilitate oral reading in context with less emphasis on the mechanics of language structure. The theory was that most students could recognize patterns of language form and did not need to be taught those building blocks. They would be motivated to read if the content was motivating and interesting. And let’s face it, the Dick and Jane stories didn’t exactly engage our imaginations!

Unfortunately, for approximately 20% of the population, that foundational skill in processing the sound system of language does not emerge naturally. That means that in a typical classroom of 25 children, five children would meet with failure if not provided direct instruction about the sound system of language. We now recognize that a balanced approach to reading instruction is optimal, and teaching trends are adjusting accordingly.

Recent technological strides have allowed researchers to observe brain function during reading. Inefficient pathways in the brain result in less efficient analysis of sound patterns and sequences for 20% of readers, resulting in a lack of phonemic awareness, the concept of discriminating, segmenting, and blending sounds into syllables and syllables into words. These students demonstrate poor word attack skills (decoding or “sounding out” words), poor word recognition, and poor spelling, in spite of average or above-average intelligence. They must exert such effort in decoding individual words that comprehension suffers. We also know from research that, without direct intervention, reading never becomes automatic for these students. They will continue to exhibit reading disabilities throughout their high school years.

The good news is that phonemic awareness is a sensory-cognitive function. It can be developed through direct, explicit, and intensive instruction about the sound system of language. Through multi-sensory stimulation, students can learn to recognize individual phonemes, to discriminate similar-looking or similar-sounding pairs, and to blend sounds into meaningful syllables. Early intervention is critical and should begin as soon as difficulties are observed.

In the future, screening capabilities may be able to identify differences in brain function in infancy. For now, our best indicators come from the observations of the significant adults in a child’s environment--his parents and his teachers. A preschool-aged child should begin to show some interest in word play. Dr. Seuss stories are usually childhood favorites because of their patterns of rhyming and alliteration; however, a child who doesn’t perceive the humor of sound play may not attend to the text for long. Word play also includes recognition of rhyming words and word similarities and differences. Preschool children should begin to show some interest in letter representations, recognizing the letters of their names or familiar signs and logos.

Most kindergarten programs include direct reading instruction, so the kindergarten student who has classroom difficulty with sound-symbol association, categorization of beginning sounds (same/different), and early sound-blending may be exhibiting signs of poor phonemic awareness. First graders should be able to utilize the sound system of language to decode unfamiliar words and to write words that follow expected patterns of English spelling.

A student will have the best potential for success if intervention begins early; however, it is never too late to improve skills in reading and spelling. Although English seems to be confusing, approximately 80% of the words we use do follow expected patterns of spelling. Even older students can be taught strategies for recognizing and utilizing those patterns.

Dick and Jane are doomed to be 20th century nostalgia, but “phonics” instruction has returned!

Judy N. Moock, M.A.;CCC-SLP, is a speech-language pathologist in practice at Abilities, and the author of Abilities’ systematic phonics program, Making Sense of Sounds for Reading and Spelling©.

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When Handwriting Is A Hassle
By: Stacy Thompson, MHS, LOTR

If handwriting is a hassle in your household, completing homework can become a dreaded and stressful event. If you have seen comments such as “messy” or “sloppy” on graded papers, it is likely that your child’s teacher has concerns as well. Because writing consumes a large portion of the average school-aged child’s day, much of a child’s success in school is determined by his ability to write in a neat and timely manner. While a child may have an accurate understanding of the material, if he is unable to communicate that knowledge in written format, academic performance can suffer. In order to determine the best approach for improving your child’s handwriting, it is helpful to explore what types of problems are present.

Logically, the first sign of handwriting problems is poor legibility. Quite simply – no one can read it! To understand why your child’s writing is illegible, look at letter formation, sizing, spacing, and alignment. If your child’s letters are reversed (past age six) or formed incorrectly, this is often the first indication of a problem. If size is an issue, there may be no differentiation between heights of capital vs. lower case letters. You may see letters of a variety of sizes. When spacing is a factor, you will see spaces that are either too large or too small between letters of a word and between words. The words are either on top of one another or so far apart they take up an entire line. When letters appear to float on the page, rather than sitting on the baseline, this indicates an alignment concern. These, and a variety of other factors, can add up to “messy” handwriting.

A second indication of handwriting difficulty involves fine motor skills. Fine motor skills are critical for successful handwriting. Your child must have the necessary motor skills to grasp and guide a pencil. While a poor pencil grasp alone does not indicate a handwriting problem, poor grasp in conjunction with illegible writing raises a red flag. An awkward or tight grasp can lead to cramping and fatigue, which may slow your child down or lead to an avoidance of writing. Using larger muscles groups of the whole hand rather than the smaller muscles on the “skilled” side of the hand (thumb, index, middle fingers) sacrifices the ability to make small, precise excursions. Also, using more than the skilled fingers can result in heavier writing pressure. If a child is writing heavy enough to tear his paper, his pencil grip should be addressed. Other areas to consider regarding fine motor skills include: difficulty buttoning or tying shoes; poor cutting skills; avoids small, manipulative tasks; unable to open containers; frequent spills while feeding himself, etc. If you have concerns regarding these skills, consult an occupational therapist.

Would you describe your child’s writing as fast and hurried or slow and labored? Writing should be a natural and comfortable task for your child. If your child is writing in a slow and labored manner, each letter may be a struggle. Homework might consume three to four hours every night. Your child’s interest in writing may be decreased because it requires too much effort and energy. On the contrary, children who write quickly might pay so little attention to detail that accuracy and neatness are sacrificed for speed. Your child may dislike writing so much that their goal is to “get it over with,” leading to a rushed pace.

Other factors that may contribute to handwriting difficulties include vision, posture, attention, self-regulation, organizational skills, visual-perceptual skills, sensory processing, muscle tone, language, etc. If your child has trouble composing a paragraph, organizing his thoughts to write a paper, spelling, or answering an essay question, this may indicate the existence of a language-based component to handwriting difficulties. A speech-language pathologist is trained to address these aspects of handwriting. It is not uncommon for children to have difficulty with both the mechanics and the written language aspects of writing. These children may or may not have the diagnosis of dysgraphia, a disorder of written language. They can benefit from a team approach including occupational therapy and speech-language therapy. Occupational therapy addresses fine motor, sensory-motor, visual- perceptual, and organization of behavior skills while a speech-language pathologist tackles the tools of written language, including spelling, punctuation, grammar, and composition. Through fun, hands-on learning experiences, therapy can make handwriting less stressful and more successful.

Stacy Thompson is a licensed occupational therapist practicing with her colleagues at ABILITIES. She conducts individual and group handwriting intervention utilizing the Handwriting Without Tears program TM. ABILITIES Ready, Set, Write Program offers the team approach of OT and Speech-Language intervention for handwriting difficulties.

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