How to Reduce the Struggle of Handwriting in Your House [Show]

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Gretchen Roe: 00:00:04.737
Welcome to The Demme Learning Show. Our mission here is to help families stay in the learning journey wherever it takes them. This bonus episode was previously recorded as a webinar and was not created with the audio listener in mind. We hope you will find value in today’s episode.

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:22.250
Hi everybody. Welcome. My name is Gretchen Roe, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you to this conversation today that we’re going to have about handwriting. I think by accident a year ago, we touched what would be politely known as the third rail as far as what is a challenge in our homeschools. And so today we’re going to have the opportunity to talk about this. We have research to share with you. We have information to share with you. We have some things that I wish had been said to me in the 21 years that I homeschooled. So by way of introduction, my name is Gretchen Roe. I am the community outreach coordinator here at Demme Learning. I’ve been with a company now going on eight years next week. And it is my very great pleasure to welcome my esteemed colleague, Lisa Chimento today. My husband and I have six children we homeschooled for 21 years. And some of the information that I will share with you today is coming from personal experience. Some of it will be coming to you from my daughter-in-law who is an occupational therapist specializing in working with children with grip strength issues. And then we have other information that we will be sharing with you as well.

Lisa Chimento: 00:01:42.293
My name is Lisa Chimento. I’m a customer success consultant and a placement specialist here at Demme Learning. I’ve been with the company full-time since 2017, but before then, I did about 12 years of homeschool conventions and got a chance to meet lots of great homeschooling families and talk with them. I just loved working with our customers. You guys are the best ever. And I’m so glad to see so many of you here. I have four children. They are all grown and flown. I homeschooled them for 25 years from kindergarten through high school, graduation, and it was probably the best decision I have ever made in my life. Not always the easiest on a day-to-day basis, but all in all, the sum total is no regrets.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:36.099
And I agree with Lisa. My husband and I, with our six children, five of them are graduated college, four of them have flown the coop. In fact, we are that family who had five fly the coop, and then one who’s returned home. And our youngest is a junior in high school. So the information that I will share with you today is information that I have captured in the last eight years as Demme Learning’s consultant for families who have children who learn differently. So we have lots of information to share with you today. And the way I want to get this conversation started is I have a phrase that I’m known for at homeschool conferences and I want to share that phrase with you all today. And it’s keep the thing, the thing and I want you to take away, if you take nothing else from this presentation away, I want you to keep that in mind when you are working on handwriting, that’s what you’re working on. When you are working on composition, that’s what you’re working on. Don’t worry about handwriting. When you are working on math, as long as it is legible, don’t worry about handwriting. And I know I’m a good German girl. I’m an only child which made some interesting situations with multiple kids because I didn’t understand why they just could not do it the way I said so. But the truth of the matter is, your brain can only focus on one thing at a time. And because of that, because your brain can only focus on one thing at a time, if you’re asking a child to write compositionally, which means you’re asking them to write creatively, they don’t have the bandwidth to also focus on correct letter formation. So if you will consider that what you want is I want a great composition, don’t worry about handwriting. You can worry about neatness in the final copy. There’s another thing that parents have asked us frequently, over 200 of you. There were at least 70 responses here. What do I do about absolutely abysmal, awful handwriting? And so I have a couple of things I want to say about that. And the first thing is children are sponges and they will absorb everything you say. So let me encourage you not to say, “Man, your handwriting is really lousy.” [laughter] And I say this from a very personal perspective. My eldest son is 32 years old, and he had absolutely the worst handwriting I ever saw when he was a kid. In fact, he would write something on a piece of paper and bring it to us and say, “What does this say?” And I would say, “Dude, you wrote that. You mean you can’t read your own handwriting?” And if he couldn’t read his own handwriting, how he expected us to read it was just impossible to me. Here’s what I learned. Here’s what he taught me because I honestly think when you homeschool, your kids teach you more than you teach them. He says that he vividly remembers standing in the shower at the age of 17, washing his hair and going, “You know, my handwriting doesn’t need to be absolutely awful.” And this is a kid who went on to college and majored in graphic design and typography and has absolutely some of the most gorgeous handwriting I’ve ever seen. But I will tell you that we argued a lot in his growing up years about his handwriting, and I asked him about that. I saw him over Christmas, and he said, “You know what, mom?” He said, “The truth of the matter is I kind of felt really bad about my handwriting struggles when I was a kid.” And he said, “It took me to adulthood to learn that it wasn’t necessarily me. It was a lot of being able to grow up.” And one of the things that my daughter-in-law says who happens to be his wife – she’s the occupational therapist – is there are things that we can control and things that we can’t control and neatness of handwriting falls into that gray area of maybe we can control it and maybe we can’t. I just wanted to show this to you all. Can you see this? This is what my grandchildren call me. It says grandy. This is the handwriting that my son free-handed on a package for me for my birthday. And if you had told me that the 10-year-old child whose handwriting none of us could read, including him, could write that beautifully as an adult, I wouldn’t have believed you. So the reason I tell you that story is I want you guys to bear in mind that what you think is terrible right now may not be so terrible down the road. Toward that end, Lisa, I know that you’ve had four kids with a variety of different skill sets, and I wonder if you can talk about some of the things in your family that you found with regard to handwriting, some of the things that you used, and particularly I’m thinking about your very creative child and how you encouraged her creativity and how you kept that train on the tracks if you will.

Lisa Chimento: 00:08:20.021
Yeah. Sure. I’d love to. So I remember early on, first of all, just a little throwout thing here to mention in case nobody has seen it, someone showed me when my kids were little that they have these nifty little things. They’re rubber and they go on the pencil. And they’re triangular in shape. So they have a soft grip. And it really helped. She showed me how to have them pick up a pencil if it’s laying down on a table like this to use the two pincher fingers and pick it up like this and then flip it upside down and bring that middle finger underneath it to steady it. My dad was an artist of some skill. And so handwriting when I was growing up was really, really important to him. But I would watch him, and I remember him sharing with me how surprised and disappointed he was to see that handwriting had sort of gone out the window in schools. But when he was young, they would do things that involve the entire arm. You didn’t start with wrist motion because especially for young children that was really hard. And of course, they wrote on blackboards. So they were standing vertically, and they had the opportunity to use the whole arm movement. And they did things like big circles or ovals or lines up and down. And I have sort of seen a resurgence of that coming back in the homeschool circles. So those things are really good to do. They build first great motor development. And then later on, we move towards fine motor development to be able to help with penmanship and control. That’s number one there. I didn’t want to forget to say that. In terms of my kids, I have to say I have three boys and a girl. And my daughter is probably the polar opposite of me in every way imaginable. And so she was really the one who taught me the most about everything that I don’t know in my life, everything truly because she doesn’t think like I do. She doesn’t process information the way that I do. She is tremendously creative. And her penmanship was not very good honestly, growing up. And I didn’t even realize the depth of her artistic skill until she was in about fourth or fifth grade when she had some free time, went out on the back porch, and came in with a picture of a still life, a bowl of fruit. And I just looked at it amazed. It was the first drawing that I had seen by her that was– that I recognized artistic talent. And I said, “Wow. Sarah, this is really good.” And then I looked out on the porch, and there was an empty table out there. And I said, “Where’s the bowl of fruit?” And she said, “There’s no bowl of fruit.” And I said, “Then how did you do this?” And she said, “I just drew it because I remember what it looked like last time I saw one,” wherever anybody knows when that was. I was so confused and confounded that she could do such a thing. And then from that day on, I saw her artistic skill grow. And today, I mean, it’s really magnificent. But it’s not me. I don’t have that skill. I know it was a gift that has been given to her. For me, it was the first time that I began to see difference between her and me. And every day since then, I’ve had to open my brain to those differences. And it put me on a course of observation of her, whereas I had made assumptions about her before because we kind of would bang heads, and I didn’t see the differences, and why wasn’t she getting this or that or some other thing, and then I began to watch her. And I began to listen to her, and I began to ask questions instead of make assumptions. And I think that that’s the first thing we need to do. We tend to think about the way we think and what we understand, and we assume that the kids understand the same things. And so if nothing else can be gained from this meeting today, it is watch your kids. Listen to your kids, and start asking questions before you get angry, get annoyed, get exasperated, and make assumptions. Start to ask questions: “What did you hear me say? What did you think about that? How does it feel when you sit down to write? What kinds of things are you thinking about? What makes you upset?” I mean, we can’t make assumptions. And I think we will grow to learn so much about our kids and about the world in general when we start asking questions before making statements or assumptions.

Gretchen Roe: 00:13:23.717
Absolutely. And I think that that is really important. Several of you made the observation, when you registered, that you’re having a struggle with a child who doesn’t want to put a pen to paper because instead they want to keyboard. And here’s what I have to tell you about neurological development. There is a very famous study that was done at Stanford University, and they repeat this study frequently because they have freshman psychology students use the study to learn how to do observational research. They take a class, and they split it in half, and half the classes allowed to keyboard their notes, and the other half is required to write their notes. And at the end, they measure the student successes at the midpoint and at the final. And invariably, without fail, the students who have handwritten their notes have better scores than the students who have keyboarded their notes. And here’s why. I’m going to pick up my own keyboard here, and tell you that my brain can’t tell the difference between striking this key and striking this key. It’s the equivalent amount of neurological input either way. And that act of taking a pencil and writing with a pencil is critical in order to put information properly into our brain in the long term. Now, I have a couple of observations for you. Many of you said that you have children whose handwriting is very sloppy and very messy.

Gretchen Roe: 00:14:58.238
So I want you to look at how are they holding the pencil? Lisa gave you a great recommendation on how to pick up the pencil, but I will tell you teaching a kid how to write like this is really hard to do. And if you have a child who has weak core strength – what do I mean by that? – if you have a child who can not do sit-ups, their handwriting is going to be exceedingly poor because research connects core strength to being able to write successfully. So if that’s a challenge, let me encourage you to work on those large muscle movement things. To work on jump rope, skipping, all the kinds of things that we do that require us to have core strength before you fight the fight with handwriting. Several of you have also said that you have a child who presses down very hard with their pencil if you have a child who is beyond second grade, I would encourage you to change pencils. If you give them a mechanical pencil, they can’t press really hard because as soon as they do, the pencil breaks. But just like Lisa said, listen to your children. You need to explain why you’re substituting wood for plastic, and that makes a tremendous amount of difference.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:27.237
Here’s the third thing I want to say to you all. Often, parents will say, “My child has absolutely awful handwriting,” and sometimes that handwriting challenge has nothing to do with the coordination of their hands and everything to do with how they are perceiving the world from a vision perspective. So I want to make two observations here, and then we want to open the floor to conversation. Very often, we fail to recognize how much vision is a mitigating factor in all of our academic learning and experiences. And I have this conversation multiple times a week with different families. If you have a child who has very, very messy handwriting, and they are making letters that are different sizes in their handwriting slopes one way or the other, or they fatigue very quickly in the handwriting process, it might behoove you to take an observational look at whether or not vision is a mitigating factor for them. What do I mean by that? I’m not talking about 20/20 vision. I’m not talking about the vision test that they do in the pediatrician’s office where they stand you on one square and they have you look down a hall and tell which way the E is facing. What I’m talking about is whether your child’s eyes track together across a page the way they are intended.

Gretchen Roe: 00:18:04.485
And if you suspect that there is something wrong, not every optometrist can diagnose this, and ophthalmologists will not diagnose this because ophthalmologists are interested in the health of the eye, not whether the muscles of the eye track together appropriately. I’m putting in the chat a website for you to visit. It’s the College of Optometric Vision Developmentalists, and what I want you to do is to go check out their quality, if I can spell quality as I talk, of life survey. Ask your student those questions, and if they say yes to enough of them, then that website will also help you find a qualified diagnostician to help evaluate binocular vision. Binocular vision is absolutely enormous in students being able to learn well. And sometimes we as parents make the misapprehension that we have a child who has dyslexia because if you go read the laundry list of what connotes dyslexia, it sure looks like that’s what’s going on. But if you don’t rule out binocular vision as a mitigating factor, you really don’t know whether your student has dyslexia or not. I’m the parent of an adult dyslexic. I’m the parent of two children who have had to go through vision therapy, and I will tell you that vision therapy, regardless of the cost, is worth the investment with the right practitioner. Someone who is certified through the College of Optometric Vision Developmentalists would be the best place for you to begin.

Gretchen Roe: 00:19:48.605
All right. So what we’re going to talk about now is– with 231 attendees or registrants, we’ve got 231 questions. And one of the things that was– an observation that was made today as a parent of a daughter who is dyslexic– here is an observation that you can make, and that might be helpful to you. With my two dyslexic children, teaching them to write in cursive was enormously helpful. And we’ve kicked cursive to the curb just like we’ve kicked spelling to the curb. And cursive is a wonderful vehicle for helping a student to be able to write accurately because you can’t flip letters when you write in cursive. You have to be able to connect the letters. And if cursive seems like a daunting task to you, let us encourage you to take a look at Handwriting Without Tears. They have a wonderful program. The other thing you might look at is something called connected printing, which is another way to keep your students from flipping letters, and that might be very beneficial to you. Lisa, I wonder if you could talk to parents about balancing kids’ frustration about doing something they don’t like with a parent’s desire to get them to do it accurately.

Lisa Chimento: 00:21:21.815
Okay. So first of all, I think a couple of questions need to be answered and I’m going to hearken back to what I said before about observing. I think you want to watch what happens when your child picks up a pencil. How are they holding it? Are they able to even hold it? And Gretchen and I have had this conversation back and forth. One of the things that has become apparent over the years since the advent of handheld devices is that when children at a very young age are able to sit with a phone or something where they’re holding it like this and they’re using their thumbs or a game controller or whatever, it may be impeding the development of this muscle and tendon here that allows them to be able to make an O or a C formation. If you notice that your kids– if this is shortened, you may need to do some exercises to help this. Because it might actually be painful to hold a pencil properly. If that’s the case, then they’re not going to be able to form the letters right and do the handwriting that you want to do. And it won’t make them want to write it all. They will dread it, and they will avoid it. So we want to make sure that first of all, it doesn’t hurt. So that may need to be happening here is that this muscle may need to be worked on so that they can hold a pencil properly, that it’s not painful. So that’s an observation thing that needs to be made. So before we’re looking for perfection and proficiency in something, we need to be able to see first, are they able to do it. Secondly, I think what Gretchen mentioned early on needs to be repeated. If you are in the middle of teaching someone how to spell, or how to write creatively, or how to parse a sentence in grammar, that’s not the time to address handwriting. And so you have to make a decision about what it is that you’re focusing on at that moment. When you’re sitting down to do penmanship and you are doing copy work, perhaps, and that’s one good way to do penmanship is do the copy work so that they’re not having to worry about what they’re writing. Don’t make them work on a piece of creativity when you’re doing penmanship. Don’t make that the time that you want them to be writing a thank you note. Penmanship should be something that everything else is thoughtless. So give them a piece of literature or whatever you use, and have them do some copy work, have it be right above what they’re writing so that they don’t have to be looking here and then looking there. Let it be right there so that they can write below it. Make sure that the lines that they’re writing on are appropriate for their age and size, and that the implement they’re writing with is appropriate as well. And you can start with a young child with a big, fat crayon that doesn’t require such a tight grip so that it’s a little easier on their little hands. All of these things need to be taken into account. Secondly, how much time are you spending on it? Young children, their muscles fatigue much more quickly. And you need to make sure that you’re not making them sit there for 15 or 20 minutes or longer and writing. If that’s the case, quit. 5 to 10 minutes, tops, and then take a break. Let their hands recover. Otherwise, you can stress out those little muscles that are still developing. And in the meantime, do some different kinds of exercises to help with that muscular growth. Throw a ball, go outside and do things, put their hands around a monkey bars and let them hang and grip. That’s good for abdominal muscles as well, but it gives them a nice big pole to put their hands around and help with that stretch. Am I forgetting anything?

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:32.310
No, not at all. As a matter of fact, I wanted to share with you, Lisa made a really important point. That little circle is huge. And I’m going to put another article in the chat for you all. This is from the Minde-Eye Institute out of Chicago. And it’s talking about how old-fashioned games, which we’ve kind of stepped away from, helped us developed hand-eye coordination. We play so many things in the digital world with our phones and things like that, and younger and younger kids are really adept at playing on the phone. The challenge is we don’t develop the central detailed vision that requires visual acuity for us to be able to do that. What are some of the things I’m talking about? In the tail on the donkey, dropping a clothespin – most of you probably don’t even know what a clothespin is – through the neck of a Coke bottle. Anything that you can do that requires visual acuity. In other words, being able to figure out where a student– where something is in space and time is something that you should attend to. Here’s one of the things that parents often say to me. I will ask a parent when they tell me that they have a child who’s really struggling with reading or math fact recall or attentiveness to detail or even staying clued in in a class situation– when you’re sitting down for half an hour to read and all of a sudden you’ve got the child who’s doing this and rolling around, what’s happening with that child? Sometimes that’s neurological overload. So one of the things that we would like you all to be able to take away is to recognize that your child has an intention span for new material of their age plus two to three minutes. So now think of your little darling and think of, “All right, what are we learning today? We’re learning a new math concept. We’re learning a new page of math.” As parents, particularly if you were educated in public, parochial, private school, in a classroom situation, you remember doing an hour of math. And we he failed to take into account that the vast majority of that math time was crowd control. Your little darling at the age of 10 has an attention span of their age plus two to three minutes. So beyond that, you’re not going to get the kind of performance that you want. You would be better to step away and come back to it. Here’s another observation. Somebody ask a question, both in the registration questions and then in the chat here. “What about cursive handwriting?” Cursive is terrific for everything except learning to spell. Why would I say that? Because we read in print, and so we have to learn to spell in print. And spelling is actually a visual skill. One of the things that we struggle with understanding with our kids is sometimes, we have kids who read very adroitly and can’t spell worth a tinker. And we think, “What is the problem here? What’s the disconnect?”

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:10.108
Well, spelling and reading are actually opposite skills. They’re the two sides of the same coin, but they’re not the same thing. And if being an adept reader equated with being a good speller, you wouldn’t have 3 out of– or, 25% of adult Americans saying that they spell hesitantly. And so spelling is an entirely different game. There are plenty of resources on our website if you want to find out more about that. Tiffany had mentioned handwriting that’s called Getty-Dubay, G-E-T-T-Y hyphen D-U-B-A-Y, and it is a form of italic script. And it may be easier than traditional cursive for you to teach your children. My children actually all learned a form of modified Getty-Dubay. And I have to tell you, my dyslexic son, who’s now 22, didn’t learn to write in a coordinated fashion until he was 10 and a half years old. Many of you have children who are 5, 6, and 7 years old, and you are expecting that 5, 6, 7-year-old to produce handwriting like an adult. It’s not going to happen. So let me encourage you that taking the pressure off them will make a tremendous difference for them long-term.

Lisa Chimento: 00:30:39.294
Gretchen, I noticed Vandana asked a question, how to enhance writing speed. And–

Gretchen Roe: 00:30:46.013
Yeah. And you know what, I was getting ready to answer that to her. One of the things that you have to remember is speed comes with proficiency, and proficiency comes with practice. And so we learn to do things proficiently because we’ve had a lot of practice with it. So maybe you won’t see that kind of proficiency in a child because you as an adult have had a lot more practice with it. I know that I was the worst parent as far as expecting my kids to deliver in the same way I delivered as far as their abilities instead of recognizing that they were not small adults but they were kids. So you may not see handwriting speed. Let me also say as an aside, which I think is really important, if you are doing compositional handwriting, so in other words, you’re asking your child to write creatively, that’s the most difficult thing we do in a homeschooling experience. As much as some of us hate math, creative writing is the harder task. This little device is your most valuable tool in teaching your children to write creatively because what I can do here is I can open up an email, and I can hit that little button on the bottom with a microphone, and I can say to my child, “Tell me a story.” And that means we’re keeping the thing the thing, and we’re keeping creative juices flowing, and I’m letting my child talk and tell me what they’re thinking. And then we can have a document that’s in email that we can go and print out on a printer, and then we can enter the editorial process. Very often as parents we’ll say to a child, “Tell me a story,” and my child sitting there going, “I want to tell a story about an elephant. Elephant. How do I spell elephant?” Here’s the opportunity for you as a parent to keep that where it needs to be so that your child has the best chance of success. I’d like to go back to a couple of things that were asked as far as what do you do with teens that have handwriting struggles, and how do you help them feel it’s important. And Lisa, I know that you and I talked a lot about this, so can you talk– because a teen is a different breed than a little child, so can you talk a little bit about that?

Lisa Chimento: 00:33:35.532
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that this will also relate to Jenny’s question that she just asked about the student taking notes and then reorganizing them into typing. I think we can talk about that together. And this may help go to motivation for that teenager because in terms of long-term retention and deeper understanding of any material, handwriting aces typing every time. There are great studies, and after we’re finished with the round table today, go back and look at the links that Gretchen offered at the beginning because it gives great explanation about this. When you are forming letters with your hand, there are more neurons activated. There is more sensory input and engagement that is occurring. You are feeling. You are seeing. There is friction with that pencil or pen against the paper. All of that is sending sensory information to your brain. So your brain is getting more information, and that material is going to the part of the brain that’s called the– excuse me, the hippocampus. And the hippocampus is responsible for making a decision. Do I hold on to this for long term, or do I discard it? How important is it? The thing that gives that brain information that this is important to hold on to is sending more information through the different senses. When you type at a typewriter, the only thing that’s happening is that your hands are hitting keys, and one key feels just the same as another key to your brain and to your fingers. But when you are forming letters, there’s difference happening, and the brain is perceiving every one of those motions.

Lisa Chimento: 00:35:31.311
So making sure that you can have them handwrite– well, now, of course, they might have to do several drafts if they’re doing a report or a research paper. Have them handwrite out those first drafts and let them make the changes that they want to make to those first drafts. And let the final report be the typed one that they hand in. But in the meantime, what’s happening is so much learning is happening while they’re handwriting. It does a number of different things it increases creativity, it deepens thinking, the brain is picking up all of that input. Putting pencil to paper, actually also activates areas of the brain that deep and comprehension. And for students for whom this is no longer painful or stressful, it actually relieves stress. So getting the opportunity to write that out. Here’s the deal, when your kids are frustrated, give them a piece of paper, let them write down all the frustration. First of all, it’s better than speaking it. It gives them an opportunity to get all of that emotion out and that gives them time to think about what they really want to say, that will be a more productive, and maybe less harmful. So that’s a big piece of it. It does release feelings and improve mood. I will share a story about myself. And it’s very personal. When my father passed away, I was feeling it all over the place. And I remember sitting down, sorry, and I just started to write. And it was an opportunity to get all of that feeling out on paper so that I could function and do the rest of the things that I needed to do. It’s important that the kids have that opportunity to share their feelings in a way and maybe they’re not ready to speak them yet. And to be able to share feelings in a way that releases that emotion, and releases that stress, and then gives them an opportunity to think through what they really want to say. And maybe they’ll tear up what they wrote because maybe it’s not for someone else’s eyes. But it’s that opportunity to do such a thing. So for teenagers, handwriting is hugely important.

Lisa Chimento: 00:37:57.235
And I’m going to bring up one more thing about my beautiful daughter, Sarah. She today is a writer. I think she’s got several trilogies in the works. It just never stops her creativity. But her spelling was atrocious when I was homeschooling her. We used to actually use some of her spelling as family entertainment because it was hilarious. It was so bad. But her spelling has improved over time because she writes everything out in manuscript before she puts it in her computer. When she is thinking and doing the creative process, it’s all in handwriting, which I think is just marvelous because we didn’t have spelling you see back then. I didn’t know what I know now back then to tell her to do that. But she just did it. And has made such an improvement when she sends me her writing now. I’m like, “Wow, you spelling has improve so much.” So all of that, hope that was okay to share, all of that. Sorry, I got emotional.

Gretchen Roe: 00:39:01.931
No, that’s quite all right. That just means that it’s important. And one of the things I know that’s going to happen, particularly with parents who are going to watch the video, there were video recording of this event is, I know there’s moms sitting there with kids that you really feel that they have dysgraphia and there is a huge meltdown when you ask them to pick up a pencil. And that meltdown I know is four times more likely if you have a boy than if you have a girl. So I want you to take a step back for a hot minute and answer the question how often does your child play video games? Because I just read a study. In fact, I was trying to get the link to this and for some reason the study that I read, the link will come up accurately. But there is a recent study that was done that the number of kids being diagnosed with dysgraphia has gone up five fold as the number of kids who are playing video games goes up. And here’s one of the things that I want you to think about. When you write, it takes time. Yeah. It takes time to get that feedback. You actually have to invest the time. And one of the things that happens with video games is feedback is almost immediate. So it’s an immediate dopamine change in your brain. And you want that more often. So the more resistance you see in a child’s to writing, the more you have to ask yourself, “Have I uncovered every other base to make sure that I don’t have anything else going on here?” And again, I’m not trying to put a plug in here for anything one way or the other. But while I have been sitting here, I have received two emails from parents who said that they had children with dysgraphia. We talked about that. And I encouraged them to make sure that they ruled out binocular vision as a mitigating factor. And both of those children had binocular vision issues. And so, when you have a child who absolutely is resistant to this process, it may be that they’re resistant to the process because, neurologically, it is making them sick. And so that’s why ruling out binocular vision as a mitigating factor would be an enormous benefit to both you and your child. Here’s another thing that parents have said– and this is an interesting one. I’m left-handed. So you keep seeing me pick up my pencil left-handed. I have six kids. And of those six kids, only one of them is left-handed. So how does a lefty teach a righty to write?

Gretchen Roe: 00:42:03.261
And the truth is you sit across the table from them. And you let them watch you write. And then they have to reverse it. It’s like writing in a mirror. Now, one of the things that I learned when my kids were small is I learned to write upside down so that they could see the letters right side up. But that’s not something all of us have the brain capacity to switch up and be able to do. The other way that you can teach them to write is to put a mirror up in front of you. And I apologize. I actually had my handwriting mirror. And it’s laying on the bed in the other room. I forgot to bring it in here. We would prop a mirror up in front of us. And as I would make letters, and they would watch in the mirror. So if I was sitting next to them, they would be able to watch in the mirror. And they would be able to make the letters. And so that was one of the ways that I helped my kids be able to learn to write. Here’s another observation for you all that is hugely important. And it’s a very tiny thing. But boys are builders. What do I mean by that? So I’m going to take my notebook paper here. Boys will very often make letters bottom to top. So they’ll make an H that looks like that. And they’ll draw up the page. And so I think we, as parents, have to decide what hills we’re going to die on. And if you have a six to seven-year-old, this is a hill worth dying on. Why do I tell you that? Because it takes twice as much neurological energy to write from bottom to top as it does from top to bottom. And I’m not saying that– they have done MRI studies with how much of the brain lights up when a child writes top to bottom versus bottom to top. Now, why do I say six to seven years old? Because if you got a 10-year-old that’s doing that, that’s a well-ingrained habit. Man, it is super hard to switch up a well-ingrained habit. Another thing that several of you ask is, how in the world do you determine when you have a kid who’s picking up the pencil in one hand and picking it up and you got a five-year-old that’s they’re all over the map? How do you determine which hand is their dominant hand? A couple of things that might be helpful but are not definitive. I actually asked my daughter-in-law this and she said, one of them is you can ask them to cite at a distance. So, hey, see that picture of the monkey over there on the wall. I want you to close one eye and put your thumb over the monkey. You all see what I did? Closed my right eye, my left eye is open, my left thumb is up. That’s not 100%. But it is kind of a good indicator. Lisa and I were talking about this last week. And we were talking about the fact that the more you can get a child to be in their dominant hemisphere, the better off you are. But sometimes that doesn’t always work. So Lisa, can you talk a little bit more about that about the difference in dominances?

Lisa Chimento: 00:45:27.887
Yeah. I think probably the majority for the majority of people if they’re right-hand dominant, they’re right-eye dominant, and so forth. But it’s not always the case. It’s not in mind. And I went to the optometrist to get contacts and I wanted to try that monovision thing, and he made that assumption and ended up prescribing it incorrectly for me. But I’ll tell you what if you ask me to look at something through one eye, I will close my right eye because my left eye is dominant, but my right-hand goes up to do that exercise. I wouldn’t use my left hand because I’m right-handed. So that might be something to see. So don’t tell them which finger to put up, just say, “Okay, put up a thumb and close one eye and look at that thing on the wall across the room.” And then notice which hand will go up to do it, but which eye will be closed. And that will give you some idea, a general idea of which hand dominance they have. And then also, which I dominants, they have, and it might be the same one, but it might be different.

Gretchen Roe: 00:46:35.356
The other thing that’s important to take in mind is kids are resilient, and kids will do all sorts of things. I will tell you my youngest son wouldn’t choose a hand for love or money. He drove us absolutely bananas trying to get him to choose a hand. And then I thought God had solved the problem when he fell out of a tree at the age of seven and broke his right arm because I was pretty sure in this test and the fact that he kicked with his left foot, I was pretty sure he was left-handed. So when he broke his right arm, I’m like, “Yes, I got it.” And then a year later, he broke the other arm. And so then he had to use the other hand. And he actually drove a tutor who worked with him absolutely insane because he was the child who would start this way, get to the center of the paper, take the pencil and go like this. It was the craziest thing I’d ever seen. And I thought, “How in the world is this kid doing this?” And he did it for about a year, and he was eight, eight, nine years old, and then he finally settled that he was going to be right-handed. Now, I will tell you this kid swings a golf club left-handed. He kicks left-handed. He’s got a second-degree black belt in taekwondo. And if he raises his left foot, you better duck But he writes right-handed. So his brain has learned to compensate for that. And a lot of times, our brains do learn to compensate for that. But if we can help our kids towards choosing a hand, it makes an enormous amount of difference. And probably the best advice that I can offer to you as parents is give your kids grace and recognize that kids have a long road that they still have to go. And our job here is to help them get there successfully. Lisa, I wonder if you could talk about athleticism. I’m thinking particularly of Stephen and his athleticism and how that played into his handwriting a little bit.

Lisa Chimento: 00:48:52.850
Yeah. And I think that in this digital age, when it is easy and we’re busy to let kids just spend more and more time with some sort of screen, we need to recognize the need to keep their bodies strong. And because we have– we’re all learning. We’re all still learning. We don’t have all the answers, but we’re trying to gather as much information as we can to share it with you and ask for you to share what you’ve learned with us as well. But we have learned that core body strength ties in. Take good handwriting and the ability to write, we’ve learned that visual function, that binocular vision muscular function ties into handwriting. And so when you can, get your kids outside and get them moving, get their bodies strengthened, give them opportunities. And very often, it can be done with just simple play, hopscotch and jumping up and down and swinging from monkey bars, and building that kind of core strength. And my son was a runner– two of my sons were runners. And boy, it really strengthened them. It gave them good wind and breathing control and the ability to endure. And it built good core strength, among other things. But here’s another thing to think about, particularly for those of you who have very young children, three, four, five, six years old, their bodies are still growing and developing. Their bones are growing and developing and so are their muscles, in everything from their small hand muscles to their very tiny eye muscles. And when you ask them to do something for too long of a period of time, it stresses those muscles. So I’m a strong reader. And I wanted my kids to love literature. And so I had to make a decision. And we switched it up from them reading themselves to me reading aloud to them. And it gave them the opportunity to get great literature, to be exposed to that versus sitting and doing close work for too long a period of time. So again, I know that we kind of lecture people about this and nag, but keep those lessons short and break them up. So if you’re doing close work, let it be for 5 to 10 minutes at a time for very young children. And keep in mind that rule of thumb Gretchen gave us earlier about adding 2 to 3 minutes to your child’s age and then letting that be a general guideline to you about how long to keep anyone sitting, if I can put it that way, and then break it up. So if they’ve got 10 minutes of reading time or desk time where they’re either writing or reading and doing close work, then stop and then go do something that will not require them to be looking at things too closely. Let them be outside and let their vision straight to something far away. And giving their hands and their fine motor muscles a chance to rest and giving their other parts of their body opportunity to become strengthened. It’s also great, of course, for vitamin D from the sun and fresh air and just that opportunity to grow in lots of different areas, but I think getting that movement going is going to be really, really helpful in so many ways, and finding that article from the Mind-Eye Institute about the types of games to play to help with visual orientation in their space is so hugely helpful. All of this pulls in together, so keep the connections in mind.

Gretchen Roe: 00:52:39.144
Lisa, we’re coming to the bottom of the hour, which means we’re coming to the end of our time with our parents here, and we could spend another two hours talking about this because there’s literally so many questions to answer and so many things that parents had me– I hope that we have answered some of the questions, but I know we have left questions for you, so I’m going to put Lisa’s and my information in the chat, and I’m going to let Lisa give you her final words, and then we’ll close it out.

Lisa Chimento: 00:53:10.165
I’m just so blessed to see so many folks showing up on this call, and I know that not everybody can make it, so for those who are going to be listening to the recording afterwards, please let us know if you have any questions. We love talking with all of you and learning from you too. We’ve learned so much from other homeschooling families as we go. This is the opportunity for lifelong learning and sharing information and helping one another, so please don’t hesitate. We support homeschooling families. We love it. Almost everyone that works in this company has homeschooled their own children; some of them still are today. So please don’t hesitate to reach out. We really look forward to speaking with you.

Gretchen Roe: 00:53:56.556
Thank you all so much for trusting us today, for spending this time with us. Please know that we are here to serve you. As Lisa said, everyone here has a vested interest in seeing that your homeschool journey is a joyful one, and whatever we can do to help that, please know that we are here to make sure that that happens. Thank you all so much for being with us today, and should the recording generate any questions for you all, please don’t hesitate to be in touch with us.

Gretchen Roe: 00:54:27.184
This is Gretchen Roe for the Demme Learning Show. Thanks for joining us. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at DemmeLearning.com/Show or go on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it.

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