Handwriting: Putting it all together

Occupational therapy

﻿Hi, I'm really looking forward to our lesson today. I hope you are too. Before we get started, this is just a little reminder. We're here to support any approaches you might already be using, and any work you might have already been set. We know that this lesson is going to be going up to so many different children and families. So if you're not sure about anything or have any questions, then please do contact your usual therapy team. I want you to try the following hand warm-ups before each handwriting session. This is really important for getting your hands ready for writing. Try and do each activity or each little warm-up, say 10 times. If you're finding that it's tricky to do one warm-up with both hands together at the same time, then just do one hand at a time. Hands open and closed. Nice fist and open, stretch those fingers. Now we're going to interlock our fingers and squeeze our hands. You can see how wide my fingertips are going because I'm squeezing and getting all of that feedback into my hands and my fingers. Okay. Squeeze. Now I want you to clasp your fingers and just pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull. Excellent. Next, let's do some finger taps on the table. If you struggle doing both hands at once, then just do one hand at a time. You can also try finger taps on the tips of your thumbs. Okay, so take each finger and just gently touch that fingers tip to your thumb. Now do some finger pulls and squeezes. Squeeze your fingers as you pull them up and away from your body. This is really good activity for getting your fingers ready for writing and don't forget your thumbs. And if you wanted an extra challenge, you could try some finger separations. Okay, so those were your hand warmups. Please remember to do them before each handwriting session. In our last lesson about handwriting, we're going to have a summary and a recap of everything we have learned throughout. Remember, we're going to look at our posture, we're going to look at where we hold our pen and our paper, and we're going to use our checklist and see how we have improved from the beginning up until now. So this is our last lesson on handwriting. Let's think back to what we have learned in this unit. So I think we can all agree that handwriting is a very tricky skill, and it uses a lot of skills from all of our body, how we sit in our chair and at the table, how we place the paper, how we hold our pens, is all really important. We have to do a lot of practise to get our letters just right. As sometimes when you start making a mistake, it becomes really hard to stop making the same mistake. There's also a lot to remember. So we have checklists to help us. Pause the video now to get some paper and a pen or pencil. Restart once you're done. For our first activity, let's consider your writing position. So let's have a think about the checklist we made before, right at the start, and everything that we need to think about before we start writing. Okay, so this is how we sit in our chairs, how we sit at the table, how we put our paper on the table or our book in front of us, and how we hold our pencil. Okay, find your checklist if you've not been using it throughout the lessons and look over it again. Check through each step and tick it off once you have completed it. As a reminder, I'll say a few of those things. So when you're sitting, are your feet flat on the floor? Is your back almost touching the back of the chair? Is your bottom shuffled nicely back? Yeah, is your tummy quite close to the table? Excellent. Are your shoulders down and relaxed? Fantastic. Okay, sounds like you've done a great job. Right. Pause the video to use your checklist that will help you get ready for handwriting. Restart once you're finished. Now let's have a go at writing several sentences together. So you've got your checklist to make sure that you're ready for writing, and if you've ticked them all off, now we can actually do some writing. Now, you will now write a few sentences about anything that you want to. A good idea is to write about your favourite things, such as games, or friends, or something fun that you've recently done. Ask an adult to time you for about five minutes, and if you want a bigger challenge, you can take more time to try and write longer sentences. Okay, so let's write a sentence but our favourite thing. I am going to write, mmh, can you guess, I'm going to write about my dogs. So I'm writing carefully. Two dogs. There is oops, Buster who is five and Buddy who is 11 weeks old. I think they are adorable. Okay. Now let's check our work. Right? let's get a pen and let's go for a thin pen, and I like to check my work in green. Okay, so let's choose this nice dark green, and what we're going to do now is check whether our letters are all sitting on the baseline. So I'm going to go across, I can draw a line. Yes. So far, they're all, oh, what's happened here? That one's under the line. Okay. And remember, we said that f can go under sometimes. Oh, look at that there under the line. let's keep going. So far, it's not bad that d could have been on top of the line a bit better. And, oh, that h could maybe have been on top of the line a bit better. Right, excellent. So we've checked if they will sit down the baseline and they weren't doing too badly. Now I want to use orange, and I want to check if my tall letters are tall enough. So that one is correct. Okay. Not bad these ones. Let's see. Mmh, that one could have been taller, couldn't it? This one here. And I think that one, there's two towards not a tall letter, but it looks very tall. Let's see that one's tall enough. Okay, oh, what about this d? I think that could have been higher. Okay, taller, and that looks good. Let's go back to that one is tall enough, and that one actually, the k is tall enough, that l is tall enough, that d is tall enough. Guys, look at this. I think we're doing okay, that h could have been a bit taller. The k is tall enough, oh that tall letter is not formed very well, is it? That h could have been a bit taller as well, and then that l I think could have been taller as well. Okay, so we can see there's some things there that we can improve on. Now let's check for let's get red, and we're going to see if our. Okay, let's get red, and have a look and see if our letters are all the right size. So I can see that n is a little bit small. The tummy of that d is a little bit small, okay, and can we can go along, I think that i could have been a bit taller, and the n could have been a better size as well. Okay, and as we said earlier that l could have been a better size. Pause the video to write some sentences. Restart once you're finished. Now let's do another checklist, and this time, it's going to help us think about how we wrote. Okay, so look at the writing that you've just done in the previous activity, and ask yourself these questions; are all my letters sitting correctly on the baseline? They are? Tick. Have I written all my letters correctly? Have you formed them correctly? Fabulous. Are my letters the right size? Yeah, good job. Have I left a space between each word? Excellent. So now what you can do is make another checklist with these questions written on and ask an adult maybe to laminate it for you. So each time after you've written, you can do a little self check and see how you've done. You could also ask an adult to say what they think of your writing. You now have two checklists. One at the start just before you start writing, and one to check your work afterwards. Okay, so these are the writing checklists that you can use. To check that you're ready to write, you can follow these points; is my back straight? Tick. Are my feet flat on the floor? Mm, they're not. What can I do to make them flat? Well, I could put a box under them. Okay. Is my tummy close to the desk? Yes. Is my paper at a good angle? Not quite, let's adjust that. I might ask an adult to help me. Am I holding my pencil correctly? Yep. Excellent. After you've written, you can then check how did you write? Are you letters touching the line? Or do you have some that are slightly floating away? Are my letters the correct size? Yeah, I think they are. Did I form my letters correctly? Let's have a look and check. Mm, yeah, I think, I think they're all okay. Are there spaces between my words? Let's have a read. Oh, yeah. Well, some of my spaces are a bit too small, then that's something you know you can work on next time. Are my tall letters tall enough? Yes, most of them are. And do my tall letters go under the line? And then you can check, check, check and go, oops, no, that g doesn't go under the line. Okay, so you can ask an adult to print this off for you, and then you can laminate it. Okay, so for writing my alphabet sentence, I'm going to choose the longer one, which was this one here. Let's have a look. The quick, can you remember the longer sentence? Brown fox, yes, jumps, let's get them sitting on the baseline nicely, over, lovely, the lazy squirrel by the oak tree. Fabulous now let us do a quick check and see how we've done. Okay, we will go where, yellow. And let's make that fix. So now let's look at each word and see where we think we could have gone better. So I think that i could have been taller. I think my o and my a should be on the baseline a bit more. Okay, I think the rest of that looks quite good. I think my a could have been formed better there. I'm going to lay the lazy squirrel, oops, that i went a little bit under the line, by the, oops, that t got an extra little flick at the top which makes it look like a little bit of an E, oak tree. Fabulous. That looks really, really good. Now pause the video to making use a checklist to check how you wrote. Restart once you're finished. As always, if you find that you're struggling, you can ask an adult for some ideas. You can also ask an adult to write the sentence out for you and you can then copy it. Remember, short simple sentences are absolutely fine. Remember, do the best for you. Try writing letters or short notes to your friends and family. They are going to be so impressed by your writing. Practise, practise, practise, and if you'd like to, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter tagging @OakNational and #LearnWithOak. Bye.

Handwriting: Putting it all together

Handwriting: Putting it all together

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