Therapy News

OT Week: Term 4 Week 4

The Scribble Struggle: Why Some Students Find Handwriting Tricky!

Handwriting is a complex task requiring coordination of:

• Posture & core stability
• Shoulder, wrist, and finger control
• Visual–motor and visual–perceptual skills
• Attention & motor planning

Difficulties in any of these areas can lead to slow, messy, or effortful handwriting.

Key Signs a Student Might Need a Handwriting Boost:

• Avoids writing tasks or becomes easily frustrated
• Tires quickly or frequently shakes their hand or swap hands
• Writes with excessive pressure or extremely light pressure
• Poor letter size, spacing, or alignment
• Difficulty copying from the whiteboard

Classroom Hacks for Handwriting Magic

1. Posture & Positioning

• Feet flat on the floor
• Desk height at elbow level

• upright sitting 

  2.  Pencil Grip & Tools

• Offer thick pencils, triangular pencils, or pencil grips
• Small pencil for hand strength and better pencil grasp

• Use a writing Slope / slant Board/ classroom whiteboard for wrist extension and and shoulder stability

  3. Page Setup

• Provide more visual cues e.g. highlighted writing lines or sky,grass,dirt paper

• Use a writing Slope / slant Board/ classroom whiteboard for wrist extension and shoulder stability

  4. Reduce Cognitive Load

• Some letters are harder than others (diagonal, numbers of strokes)

  5. Practice makes perfect! It can be a morning circle activity e.g. Sign in activities (writing on whiteboard/ type their name)

This is a name spelling activity on Seesaw. 

Search: Writing & Spelling Your Name

Then edit to make to what you want it to look like.

Curriculum Cupboards

The curriculum cupboard will be open every Monday (2:00pm – 2:30pm) and Thursday (8:15am – 8:45am) for staff to borrow classroom resources. Please contact the Therapy Team if you need access to resources outside of these times. 

Climbing Gym & OT Rooms 1 & 2

Please follow the protocols before entering the OT Rooms and Climbing Gym. There is a “Stop” sign with the rules on the door of each space. These spaces are to be used as proactive regulation spaces, rather than as a breakout space for a student who is already heightened. 

Any staff who supports students in these spaces must complete a short induction with a Therapy Team Member. Please submit a Therapy Referral if you have not completed this training and would like to book one of these spaces.

Please only use these spaces at the times that you have booked via SharePoint (Resource Booking). 

Therapy Referral System

Please submit any requests for support from a therapist via the Therapy Referral Tab on SharePoint. Our team triages new referrals every Monday morning and allocates a therapist and priority to these new referrals. This ensures that the most urgent referrals are addressed in a timely manner. You can submit referrals for SP and OT support, including requesting for us to attend classroom team meetings, care team meetings, SSGs etc. Please note that due to limited capacity, we may not be able to attend every meeting request, but we will prioritise any urgent requests.