Traffic Light Lines: A Simplified Handwriting Program

By Kimberly Lane OTR/L

Students constantly stream into Kimberly Lanes occupational therapy practice needing help with poor handwriting.

While it might not be the first challenge parents and teachers think of needing to help children overcome, handwriting is a critical skill for students to learn. Teachers cant assess what students know if they cant communicate clearly.

In this simple program geared for preschool-level students to students on a second-grade development level, Lane shares the traffic light line method for learning handwritingan easy approach for parents, teachers, occupational therapists, and children to understand.

Early on in life, children say go when the traffic light turns green, and its easy for them to envision a traffic light, which is what makes this program so wonderful. Students will learn how to practice letters in various media, recall how to form letters, and enhance their visual motor skills along the way.

The method is easy to teach, easy to learn, fast, effective, and inexpensive. So start helping children master handwriting, and position them to succeed with the traffic light line method!

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781491785676

Kimberly Lane OTR/L

Kimberly Lane, OTR/L, is an occupational therapist who has spent more than seventeen years working in pediatrics. She graduated from Stony Brook University with degrees in occupational therapy and English education. She owns her own clinic: It Takes A Village Therapy Services, LLC. She lived in New York before moving to Bradenton, Florida.

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Copyright © 2016 Kimberly Lane, OTR/L.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-8568-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8567-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015921128

iUniverse rev. date: 01/25/2016

CONTENTS

Background Stuff

Chapter 1 A Quick Overview

Chapter 2 Getting Started—Prehension

Chapter 3 How to Get Your Kiddos to Hold the Pencil Correctly

Chapter 4 Uppercase versus Lowercase

Chapter 5 Letter Formation Prerequisites

Chapter 6 Instructions for Prerequisite Shapes

Chapter 7 Uppercase and Lowercase Letters

Chapter 8 Letter Groups

Chapter 9 Teaching Letter Formation

Chapter 10 Spacing

BACKGROUND STUFF

As with all activities involving children, please provide appropriate supervision when conducting exercises and tasks. All exercises and activities should be completed in a safe environment. Do not attempt any task that is not within your child’s capabilities. Please consult a professional with any questions, especially if your child is already receiving occupational therapy services.

Please note that the author of this handwriting program, Kimberly Lane—okay, I’m switching to first person. Third person sounds so formal. I, Kimberly Lane, am an occupational therapist who believes very strongly in the sensory-processing approach to learning. I will, therefore, be very detailed and repetitive and, at times, will try to be funny, particularly because I know that the brain will begin to tune out anything that is too familiar or too unfamiliar, too easy, too complex, too lengthy (requiring you to sit for too long), too boring, or too unrelevant. Don’t panic. I know the word is irrelevant (I also have a degree in English education); however, I refuse to apply the definition of irrelevant to handwriting, because handwriting is germane and pertinent. It is one of the ways we communicate and a primary mode for our teachers to assess what we know. It is also—for some—hard.

So, back to the tuning-out concern—the brain/nervous system has a remarkable ability to habituate (the neurological term recognizing when an organism ceases to respond to a stimulus). Though I am using the term habituate loosely, if the information that you are attending to isn’t relevant to your interests, it is likely to be tuned out; you will stop responding to it at some point. Therefore, unrelevant feels more appropriate because handwriting applies to most of us (it is germane), but is it in our lineup of things we want to