People need to have certain abilities in order to contribute to society. In this sense, here are many talents and capacities that people can develop throughout their lives. These abilities, also called skills, can help individuals make the most of their lives. Skills are essentially talents or abilities that people can grow or learn, such as social skills, leadership skills and motor skills, among others.
Human beings develop and enhance skills from a very early age and all through their lives. The urgency to master a specific skill depends completely on the need and period one is living. Therefore, it is logical to relate children to primary skills that allow them to survive and interact. Individuals compose societies, and then children’s skill development plays a vital part in a social group evolution. However, it is of significant importance to understand the development of children in the cognitive, emotional and educational field.
Influence of Education on an Individual’s Skills Development
Individuals’ skills development depends greatly on their school experience. Even though a person’s education is comprised of many different influences and experiences, the school environment plays a special role in people’s skills training and enhancement. Teachers fulfill the prime objective of preparing individuals for society, which translates into the group progress or recession.
Importance of Developing Students’ Motor Skills at an Early Age
Children need to develop the motor skills under a lot of guidance and support. Piek et al. (2008) assert that developing motor skills at an early age can determine whether the child is in risk of developmental delay or not. Moreover, practicing will result in mastering the skills quickly, setting the path to learn new skills, while enhancing the previous skills. Further analysis has stated that gross motor skills learning evolution allows the child to improve memory, as well as processing speed.
Individuals develop motor skills from a very early age. Schmidt & Lee (2005) defined motor learning as several processes involving either practice or experience, resulting in somewhat permanent changes in movement’s capability. Motor skills are crucial to domain the body and learn skills, as basic as clapping, crawling, walking, gripping the bottle, waving hello and good bye, gripping a spoon, putting food into their mouths, and so forth.
This learning evolves through practice, and consists of three different stages, before the child masters the movement. The first stage is cognitive, where the individual gets a general idea of the movement; however he or she is not very sure of how to do it. This stage is full of errors and movements lack accuracy. Nevertheless, it is very important, since it compiles the requirements to complete the task.
The second stage is the associative stage. The individual improves his or her technique through practice and the number of errors decreases significantly. Consequently, one can handle the body’s mechanics with much more consistency. Experts consider this stage to be the base of the process of learning from one’s errors. As the child masters the technique, he or she can adjust movements. In addition, one will subsequently need less guidance.
The last stage in motor learning principles is the autonomous stage. It comprises multitasking development. An individual can do the assigned task while doing a secondary activity. A great example of this stage is children handwriting while exercising their auditory skill, during a dictation or even taking notes in a lecture. In this stage, individuals master the skill, so he or she does not need guidance, but monitoring.
On the other hand, it is necessary to know the categories of the motor skills. Researchers have divided them into two kinds: fine and gross. Esposito and Vivanti (2013) affirm that the gross abilities occur in the cerebral cortex, which has the control of voluntary muscle groups. Scientists relate gross motor skills with the gross movements, involving nervous system, brain and muscles. Additionally, young children develop these skills from head to toe. They start controlling the head movement, after they gain trunk stability, and finally learn how to stand up and walk.
Researchers say that even though gross motor skills develop during infancy, they continue to refine and enhance during childhood and most of individuals’ life to adulthood. It is worth mentioning that factors, such as genetics and environmental influences, contribute to the skills’ improvement.
As individuals grow, they experience different ranges of challenge, and there is no doubt that fine skills’ control is one of them. Fine motor skills involve the movement and coordination of small muscles, like hands, fingers and eyes. People ask them to do small actions that require more precision, for instance picking objects up, or writing. As with the gross motor skills, individuals enhance fine motor skills during their development stages.
Printing and handwriting is one of the most complex fine motor skills a child learns. Feder, K., and Majnemer, A. (2007, p. 312) assert that “the development of handwriting begins with early scribbling, which becomes more intentional with time”. It is at the age of one or two years when children enjoy the new experience of gripping a writing tool to develop the basics of drawing. As individuals continue to grow up, they start to learn to control their hands’ small muscles through handwriting.
Besides being one of the most complex motor skills to develop, it is one of the most significant, as well. Feder and Majnemer (2007) affirm that the consequences of failing to attain this competency all along school-age years could result in negative outcomes regarding self-esteem and academic progress.
Studies show that children should develop the skills associated to handwriting through stages that become visibly evident as the child grows up. However, these stages advance quickly within the first years of life. In the first stages, individuals tend to imitate geometric figures as they become confident in grasping the writing tool –pencil, crayon, or marker– with several errors in their traces. These stages happen around the two years of age.
This development continues to enhance the skills performance throughout the first years of school. Most researches have shown that children become able to reproduce alphabetic and numeric symbols by first grade, which ranges from ages 6 to 7. Nevertheless, the handwriting reaches a plateau at the age of 8 or 9 years, when individuals have evolved from the traces of symbols to expressing their thoughts through pencils.
The completion of these stages at the correct age is imperative for the accurate fine motor skills development. According to Feder and Majnemer (2007), handwriting highly contributes to oral and written expression –writing, reading, creativity, among others–. Therefore, if a child reaches certain age with poor writing or reading performance, the academic development will also result poor, along with low self-esteem.
As mentioned before, school is one of the main settings where children spend most of their time. This makes the teacher one of the main characters in these formative years. Therefore, it is important to transform this ambiance into an enjoyable learning temple. One of the main reasons why children learn quickly or slowly is how comfortable he or she feels in the classroom, since it constitutes one of the first nests to develop social skills.
Researchers have stated that it is necessary to engage students into pleasant activities that make them want to do the task. In addition, offering enough practice to develop the fine motor skills is crucial for their improvement. Spear-Swerling (2006, p. 1) believes that “when handwriting is perceived as ardous motivation to write may be greatly reduced, leading to lack of practice”. Children love to move and actively participate in dynamic activities regardless the pedagogic aim, which provides the teacher with opportunities to repeat or vary instructions in order to achieve the best outcomes from the learning process.
Factors that can Influence Handwriting Development
Children face new ways to see the world every day. They experience a new challenge with each new thing they learn. Therefore it is necessary to give them a nice and friendly environment where they can feel confident to make errors and continue practicing, until they master the skill, or at least, they dominate the movement of the muscles.
Engaging in a new adventure is emotionally tiring for any person, especially for children. If they feel they are not receiving enough support, they just quit and do an activity with which they feel comfortable. It is worth mentioning how students are individuals with different learning pace and style.
A teacher should not force a student to complete a task with which a student does not feel comfortable. A teacher is always the teacher of the group, but she or he is also the teacher of each student. Whether the student is auditory, visual, or kinesthetic, the goal is always the same: learning. So, the activities planned by the teacher to help students develop the handwriting skills need to range from visual to auditory, as well as being enjoyable.
As mentioned before, handwriting comprises several different sub-skills. One of the main sub-skills in handwriting learning is pencil grip. This sub-skill is another factor that can determine the success of handwriting skill development, as it determines how a student grasps a pencil. It is necessary to establish the difference between a poor pencil grip and an immature pencil grasp.
Handwriting has to develop further literacy, because not only a student knows the alphabet, but also because the handwriting is an expression, therefore it needs to be effective. When an individual writes the stroke needs to be fluid and easy to read; it means that the symbols need to be standardized through the process of learning how to write. This is possible only after a student is able to control the small muscles in the hands. The pencil grip highly affects these results.
A child needs to accomplish several development stages before grasping the pencil correctly; however, it is necessary to pay attention to the evolution of children as they go through these stages. Teachers and parents are responsible for the correct enhancement of the child’s pencil grip. If something happens and an incorrect grasp of the pencil persists, it is necessary to take further measures to correct it before the age of the stage passes and it becomes more difficult.
As with pencil grip, the posture of the body is key to achieving a good handwriting development. Correct sitting will lead to correct pencil grip, resulting in accurate handwriting techniques. These sub-skills are necessary to have a good performance and further enhancement of the fine motor skills. If a student is not sitting correctly, it is necessary to ask him or her to do so.
Nonetheless, it is imperative to provide the student with the necessary tools to accomplish each development stage. A student with inappropriate tool, such as small chairs for his or her size, uneven tables, or even lacking sharpeners, will definitely result in poor handwriting.
Methods to Help Students Develop and Enhance Handwriting
Being handwriting a challenging skill to develop, it is necessary to give as much support as possible to achieve the desired goal. However, sometimes classroom sessions are not enough for students with a slower learning pace, or a different learning style. In some cases, schools plan intervention programs, which involve individual or group sessions of extra practice, in order to develop or improve certain aspects of handwriting.
These programs have resulted very useful regarding the enhancement of techniques and data recollection to which they have led. Parents are able to see how teachers care about their children learning process. In some cases, the programs involve a school or parents to continue providing help at home.
There have been different, yet effective proposals for school-based intervention programs. One of these proposals came from Alhusaini, Melam, and Buragada (2016), who state that children with handwriting problems can enhance their skills through a sensorimotor intervention. They firmly believed that sensory input would be more effective to soothe the existing issues.
The experts have proved the receptive-productive skill technique and it has been very effective in many cases. This time, the researchers carried out the study in Minnesota, US. They measured handwriting proficiency and pencil grip strength, giving control to the students. The technique resulted effective and students enhanced significantly throughout the process.
Another intervention program gathered information after applying several techniques, from which results varied slightly or significantly. Nonetheless, they provide wide information on what techniques to use to help students develop handwriting. Gillespie and Graham (2011) carried out a series of activities that included prewriting, self-correction, process writing, collaborative writing, and text summarizing.
They compiled the first, second, and third stage of the motor skills learning process. Students were able to imitate, associate, and produce writing projects, as well as correcting themselves and others. According to the researchers, this intervention was so effective due to the social interaction and self-awareness that the program promoted.
Other strategies are more modest, yet equally effective. Strategies like changing students’ papers according to the activity make them feel more comfortable, as they discover another way to practice. Special papers for enhancing the size of symbols may seem unnecessary; however, it is very important for future writing production. A much more common technique is setting the space in which students write each letter, develop both calligraphy and spelling, as children pay attention to what letter comes after the previous one.
Conclusions
In the present times, where technology and gadgets surround every aspect of life, handwriting may seem unnecessary. Nevertheless, handwriting is one of the most necessary skills that one has to develop at an early age. It has an influence on many other skills that would not be able to develop without a completion of writing sub-skills.
As school in the second home for children, it influence is very important to develop, fix and enhance the primary skills that have to do with movement, and muscle control. However, the repercussions of poor handwriting skills go further than pencil grip and posture. Once an individual knows how to write accurately, he or she is able to develop social skill much more easily.
which becomes more intentional with time
The development of handwriting begins with early scribbling,
which becomes more intentional with time.
The development of handwriting begins with early scribbling,
which becomes more intentional with time.
The development of handwriting begins with early scribbling,
which becomes more intentional with time.
Reference List
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Sper-Swerling, L., 2006. The importance of teaching handwriting. [article] Available at: <http://www.readingrockets.org/article/importance-teaching-handwriting> [Accessed 17 July 2016].
Zwicker, J., and Montgomery, I., 2012. Application of motor learning principles to handwriting instruction and intervention. [pdf]. Available at: <http://www.childdevelopment.ca/Libraries/Printing_Like_A_Pro/Application_of_Motor_Learning_Principles_to_Handwriting_Instruction_and_Intervention_by_Jill_G_Zwicker_PhD_OT_C_-_2012.sflb.ashx> [Accessed 14 July 2016].
