About the Book

Getting it Write Edition 2 updates include the addition of Zaner-Blosser (ball and stick) printing pages for each and every exercise.

It also contains a new rubrick for use by school Occupational Therapists who need a simple method to document measurable progress when working on the goal of handwriting with students under their Individualized Education Plan as required by law. Another great benefit of this system is that kids can keep track of their own progress so that they can visually see it and own it. It also helps them learn graphing skills. This information was provided by Leni Hoffman, OTR of the Regional Educational Service District in Shiawasse County, Michigan.

There are many other editing and historical changes that were added through listening closely to comments from program users.

The book is a "how-to" manual for teachers, therapists, and parents. It contains all the forms needed to run the program, and details of how to run each of the six (6) 1-hour classes in a step-by-step fashion in a clinic, school, or community education program. All forms are reproducible. The program is designed to be used with groups of children ages 6 to 12 along with 1 instructor and 1 assistant, however, many therapists have modified it to use in individual therapy. Parents without training could use many of the activities at home as well.

Throughout the six weeks of the program, the foundations for neat and legible handwriting are discussed and explored. This leads all to a better understanding of handwriting difficulties. Handwriting is a very complicated process and problems could be due to any combination of psychological reasons, physical reasons, visual reasons, and sensory reasons.

Psychological reasons dealt with in this program may include motivation, personality, self-esteem, anxiety, memory, distractibility, attention, self-control, creativity, practice effort, developmental age, and processing speed.

Physical reasons that impact handwriting may include problems with hand dominance, laterality, fine and gross motor coordination problems, decreased strength or inability to control strength of grips and pressures, problems with muscle tone and consistency of muscle tone, interpreting pressure sensations, joint mobility, the ability to co-contract muscle groups, endurance, the ability to isolate muscle groups, and general grip development.

Visual problems explored include difficulties with visual-motor integration, visual-spatial discrimination, perceptual-motor integration, visual tracking, saccades, distance verses near-point accommodation, and convergence.

And finally sensory disturbances that may cause problems with handwriting that are explored in the program include often subtle differences in somato-sensory processing, body awareness, motor planning, proprioceptive and vestibular integration, kinesthetic feedback, tactile discrimination, and tactile defensiveness.

At the completion of the program, parents, therapists, and students will all have a greater understanding of why each individual is struggling with handwriting, and have experimented with ways to compensate for these, as well as notice an overall improvement in each participant's handwriting legibility.