Articles

Within the motor milestones exist two forms of motor development: gross motor development and fine motor development. These two areas of motor development allow an infant to progress from being helpless and completely dependent to being an independently mobile child.

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Ten-year-old Dalton has been diagnosed with dyslexia and developmental coordination disorder (dyspraxia) at Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children, and with dyslexia and dysgraphia by a multidisciplinary team at his school. Despite occupational therapy, speech therapy, physical therapy and putting three Orton-Gillingham-based programs to the test, he continued to struggle.

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Tactile and kinesthetic perceptions usually go hand in hand; therefore, they are considered together as one, namely haptic. Tactile perception refers to the sense of touch, while kinesthetic perception deals with the sense of body movements and muscle feelings.

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Researchers have recently looked at the purely motor aspects of writing in children diagnosed with dyslexia. Their results show that orthographic processing in children with dyslexia is so laborious that it can modify or impair writing skills, despite the absence of dysgraphia in these children.

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Learn more about dysgraphia: What is dysgraphia? How common is this learning problem? What are the symptoms and warning signs in early writers, young students, teenagers and adults? What are the causes and treatment?

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It's a fair question for parents to consider: Why should my child learn to master the skills of spelling and handwriting in a world governed by spell checkers and keyboards? Isn't the mere notion of teaching these skills as archaic as attempting to master trigonometry without the use of a scientific calculator?

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Most of us are right-handed, but a fair few happen to be left-handed. Why is this? Is it just something we learn to have a preference for over time, or is it something to do with our neurological wiring from birth? According to a brand new study in the journal eLife, however, it is definitively […]

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The word dysgraphia was coined from the Greek words dys meaning ill or difficult and graphein meaning to write, and is used to describe a severe problem with handwriting. What are the symptoms? What are the causes and how can it be treated?

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Fine motor skills are involved in smaller movements that occur in the wrists, hands, fingers, feet and toes. They participate in smaller actions such as picking up objects between the thumb and finger, writing carefully, and even blinking...

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Many parents think that having good gross motor skills can enable a child to excel at sports. This is only part of the benefit! Developing your child's gross motor skills can do so much more than that – they can influence a child’s ability to write well and even to concentrate in the classroom.

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By studying stroke victims who have lost the ability to spell, researchers have pinpointed the parts of the brain that control how we write words. In the journal 'Brain', Johns Hopkins University neuroscientists link basic spelling difficulties for the first time with damage to seemingly unrelated regions of the brain, shedding new light on the mechanics of language and memory.

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As with all learning problems, a writing disability can be devastating to a child’s education and self-esteem and can cause major limitations to that child’s career path. A child who struggles with a writing disability will find it increasingly difficult to express their knowledge on many subjects and thus the writing process itself stands in the way of being able to learn.

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