| Cari Sprague, OTR-L is Battle Creek Elementary's occupational therapist. She is located in room 122 put also spends much of her time supporting students in both regular education and special education classrooms. She is at Battle Creek Elementary Monday, Thursday, and Friday all day, Tuesday in the afternoon., and Wednesday in the morning. She can be reached at Ames Elementary Tuesday mornings and Wednesday afternoons by calling 651-293-8970.
The following information was taken and adapted from Maxanna Learning Systems - Handwriting: Making it Work, 1998, pages 7-23 & 24.
In schools, occupational therapy is an education-related service mandated by federal law to provide intervention for those students who have been identified under federal and state guidelines as having an educational disability and who need occupational therapy services to benefit from their special education.
Occupational therapists focus on an individual's ability to perform functional tasks within the school setting in order to improve the student's ability to profit from their special education. These areas of school function at the elementary level include:
Functional mobility
Activities of daily living
School routines
Written communication
Play and leisure
Pre-vocational
Social skills
Occupational therapists are trained to evaluate the underlying subskills needed to successfully complete functional skills. Evaluations guide the therpaist in determining the intervention needed to improve functional performance.
Handwriting is one of the many occupations of a student that occupational therapists address in schools. It is a frequent referral issue because students use handwriting to communicate what they know. Handwriting is a perceptual-motor skills that requires good conistent instruction, monitored practice, and reinforcement when completing tasks. Given a good handwriting program, most children will learn how to write with adequate speed and legibility. Intervention thus begins by insuring that a good, consistent handwtiting program isprovided to all studnets. The key here is classroom instruction. Handwriting has to be directly taught and should never be given as a homework assignment when students are initially learning letter formation.
If a student is having difficulty completing handwriting tasks despite good classroom instruction, the occuaptional therapist can often help. An occupational therapist can aid students to develop the multiple subskills needed to successfully complete handwriting tasks in a comfortable, automatic, legible, and timely way. Interventions are tailored to the individual needs of the student and can include:
*demystification of the handwriting difficulties so that teachers, parents, and the student clearly understand the student's strengths and weaknesses in this area
*development of a program to enhance strengths
*implementation of a remedial program to develop subskills such as in-hand manipulation
*assisting a teacher with strategies for intervention and instruction such as assistance with modification of the current curriculum
*modifications of the classroom environment
*development of in-class compensatory strategies
*implementation of a remedial handwriting program
If these methods do not alleviate the student's difficulties, the occuaptional therpist can help the classroom teacher develop alternate methods for the student to complete written assignments such as the use of an AlphaSmart or a computer program such as Write-Out Loud or Co-writer.
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