How to Help Students Improve Their Printing Skills

In our experience, unless a student has a fine motor issue, poor printing skills stem from lack of practice. In most traditional public school settings students are usually well screened in advance for issues that may require the remedy of Occupational Therapy. At times students fall through the cracks or experience a developmental delay. When you have a student that seems falling behind on this skill, make sure that an OT evaluates them. As we said originally, practice is key when it comes to printing skills.

How we approach teaching the letters is in order of formation difficult. I often start by teaching the letters that are just lines such (l, t, and k). This are quick and easy for students to pick up, and it will encourage them with the early success. I then move on to the letters that have lots of curves (g, j, p, q). The curves are not always the prettiest, at first. A few days of short bursts of practice usually remedy this. I then move on to the rest of the alphabet. I shy away from teaching this in alphabetic order. I have found this to be a successful strategy that I refine each year.

The most common difficulty I find that students have are gripping related. You can literally spend all day readjusting students’ hands or do one simple thing. Buy a bunch of triangular pencils. They are inexpensive and it will save you endless amounts of time. They almost force students to grip them correctly. I find that after a few months of using only triangular grips, students transition well to using traditional pens and pencils. From there, the spacing of fingers is issue number two. I fix that by working for one minute with each student individually and place tape on their pencil of where their fingers should be placed while writing. That will fix it for most students.

What is the Purpose of Upper Case and Lower Case Letters?

You might have wondered before why is there a need for upper case and lower case letters or does every language have upper case and lower case letters or complementary symbols?

You might notice that the first word of this sentence has the same letter written in two different ways. Whenever we talk about letters, we also mention the term case. Case is a term that is used to differentiate the same letters from each other. Capital letters are written in a LARGE UPPER CASE form which is also sometimes called as majuscule. Whereas, the small letters are written in a smaller lower case form which is also given the name minuscule.

To provide a clear example: A, B, and C are majuscule whereas a, b, and c minuscule. According to historians, majuscules came first, but with time lower case letters were introduced to save time and space. The lower case letters gradually came into use and became popular because they offered clear readability. Regardless of how good your vision was, it is much easier to identify English letters in the lower case. Lower case letters were also easier and faster to write.

Today, both upper case and lower case letters are used side by side in sentences and paragraphs. Over time, specific purposes for the upper case and lower case letters were formed. In the English language, upper case letters or capital letters are used at the beginning of a sentence. The first letter of the first word in a sentence is written in upper case letter. A capital letter is also used to indicate a proper noun in a sentence. The first letter of the proper noun in a sentence would be capital. Whereas, the rest of the sentence is written in small or lower case letters. These are the only purposes of upper case and lower case letters. This purpose is being strictly followed in the English language.