Children with learning difficulties often have class time devoted to developing their fine and gross motor skills. Handwriting is a fine motor skill that many children have difficulty mastering. There are, however, a few tricks that parents and teachers can use to help the learning disabled child improve their penmanship.

For the young child with smaller hands, a shorter pencil with a pencil grip can help aid in his or her mastery of the tool. Wide lined paper with distinctive lines and a broken line divider will help the child gauge his or her letters visually in relation to the size of the paper.

Simple finger exercises are also an aid in developing fine motor skills needed for writing longhand. The child can splay his fingers across a flat surface such as a desktop and lift one finger at a time. The teacher or parent touches a finger lightly and the child raises that finger.

Opening and closing the left hand and then the right hand a few times helps the child loosen up his fingers. These tactile exercises help the child focus on how his fingers operate.

A strategy that has worked for years for children, both learning disabled and non-disabled, is practicing shapes. Loops and circles, tee-pees, bumps and waves repeated on lined paper develop eye-hand coordination as well as stimulating the left-brain processes.

For the learning disabled child, this exercise can be applied using artwork. Using painter's tape, tape lines onto a large poster board, leaving three to five inches between the strips of tape. Let the child use colored markers to create artwork using the shapes. The first line can be loops followed by bumps for example. The second line is tee pees and circles, and so on.

Remove the tape and ask the child to color in the white spaces with marker. This exercise develops spatial cognizance, a necessary part of handwriting.

For many children with learning disabilities, one of the difficulties presented in handwriting is the forced position of the pencil or pen. For left-handed children particularly, the accepted hand position is uncomfortable. A one inch 3-ring notebook turned sideways and laid on the desk can aid the child in holding the pencil or pen more comfortably.

A parent or teacher can also help a young child who is demonstrating difficulties in mastering the use of a pencil by allowing the child to feel writing. The child stands close to the side of the parent or teacher and lays his hand on hers while she writes. This allows him to have a sensory experience of writing, how the fingers push and pull, how the hand moves across the paper and the position of the pencil in the hand.

For older children who continually use a keyboard, teachers and parents should encourage note taking. Keeping a pad of paper and pencil to the side of the keyboard and asking the child to write down thoughts on a subject he is researching will aid the child in continuing to develop penmanship skills.

Learn more about this author, Shelly Mcrae.
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