Developing foundational skills. We're going to talk about activities for strength, coordination, and dexterity. This exercise is the posture slide I was talking about. You can see these screenshots of the court. In one, he's leaning on his hands. He's like this. You might remember he yawned.
It's critical to have posture as a foundational skill. Your student should be sitting upright with their desk at their elbow level. We call it 90/90/90. You're looking at about a 90° angle of the arm, a 90° angle of the hips, and the legs. Their feet need to be supported.
This is the best handwriting posture, but it's almost 90/90. It doesn't have to be exactly 90, but you don't want your student to be dangling their feet. You don't want them bent over. You want them sitting upright and able to write on the desk in front of them. Many times if you have posture weakness, you can have your students sitting on a ball to work on trunk strength when they're not writing.
If your student enjoys watching television, position them in front of the television while seated on a large therapy ball. That student can work on strengthening their trunk and their posture while watching TV. They won't notice it as much. When they slouch, make sure they're sitting up. We're going to take breaks.
It's just like any other exercise. Let's see how long you can sit upright on the ball with your feet on the floor. When they need to slouch, we'll take a minute break, then sit up again. You're strengthening that posture for their handwriting. You're working on handwriting skills without even really handwriting.
These are some of the posture checklist items you can look at. You can look at the table height. The table could be too high. A lot of times when I was working in a school, kindergarten tables were up to their chins. We want to make sure that the table height is around chest height.
Feet on the floor. Paper tilt. When you have a piece of paper, it's going to be tilted. If I'm right-handed, I'm going to tilt the paper to the left and write uphill. If you're a lefty, you're going to tilt the paper to the right and write downhill.
Those are some of the posture things you want to look at. Your student may need a pencil grip if they're not holding their pencil correctly. We're going to cover that in a minute. We're going to have a tripod grasp.
You can raise the papers slightly by using a slant board, such as a three-ring notebook. It may or may not be necessary, but it alters the field of view and occasionally reduces lighting glare. Lastly, special seating.
To help them sit upright, your student might need to sit on a wiggle chair or something else that allows them to move. They might have to sit on their feet, in a hard chair, or on a three-legged stool. I am aware that my son used to frequently do that. We refer to it as perching. Because it lessens distractions, perching is acceptable.
The walls can be quite busy in a classroom. To help him concentrate, my son would get on his knees and look down at his paper. That's alright. When considering posture, we should keep that in mind.
For additional information, please watch the following video: https://youtu.be/hhzKCbhQ_H0
