How to Correct a Pencil / Pen grip and why it is so important

A few weeks ago, my cousin Trish was visiting from Dublin. Trish is a Montessori teacher and as you can imagine, it didn’t take long for the conversation to turn to learning. We were amazed to find that we have both noticed that many children dislike writing and how there seems to be a decline in handwriting skills and an increase in really bad pencil grips!

Handwriting Requires:

-Fine motor skills: Dexterity, Precision, Coordination, Grasping

-Visual motor/Oculomotor skills: Eye teaming, Convergence, Scanning

-Behavioural skills: Attention, Focus, Creativity

Writing can be both a representation of necessary skill mastery (i.e. a proper grasp = able to button a shirt, tie shoes, or open containers to prepare a meal).

OR, it can be a window into underlying delays in skill development (i.e. poor handwriting can reveal visual motor integration issues, vision issues, behavioural/emotional issues, etc.).

Humans are not born with the natural inclination to hold writing tools with a proper grip. The proper pencil grasp actually has a name: the tripod grip.  Though the tripod grip is preferred, the quadropod grip is also a common and accepted grip.

The tripod grip utilizes three fingers to secure a writing utensil: the thumb and forefinger directing, with the utensil resting on the middle finger. The quadropod grip uses four fingers working together to stabilize the writing tool.

The tripod grip is the ideal grip for proper letter and number formation and writing, and this grip is a skill that must be modelled, taught, and corrected.   When there are too many fingers involved, or if the stance is improper, writing will not be as easy as it can be.  And writing is a difficult skill even without the grip!

But how do you teach kids how to properly hold a writing utensil?

Before you even place the tool in the child’s hand, determine whether the child is right-handed or left-handed (or a ciotóg as we say in Irish).

When you are ready to introduce the tripod grip, it’s pretty simple:
– Place a writing tool in your child’s hand;
– Move the fingers to the proper position, encouraging the child to keep their little finger and ring finger on the palm so that the fingers can do their jobs (a little pom-pom is great to use here);
– Show the child how to manipulate the tool by moving their fingers more than their wrist.

And after your child does a little bit of doodling, colouring, and painting, the tripod grip will become as easy as breathing.  It’s just imperative for parents to play an integral role in instructing early on, with demonstrating, correcting, and modelling. I cannot stress this enough – children seem to be arriving to Montessori, playschool and big school with really poor tripod grips and if not corrected early it can become a problem later on.

Ideally, we want children to be comfortable writing and to teach them proper grip as a starting point.  As they get older this will mean that they are more relaxed when writing with a lot less neck, shoulder and wrist discomfort when writing essays or in exams.  They won’t be digging into the paper because the grip will be secure and they will writing with better flow.

Cursive writing will also become easier and as cursive writing aids the flow of thoughts, having the correct handwriting grip is vital.

Trish went back to Dublin and on my recommendation started to use the pom-pom with her Montessori students – the results were astounding – here’s the text she sent me:

“OMG what a difference the humble pom-pom makes! The pencil holding and letter formation with the children who were struggling has improved by 100%!  Thank you…thank you.”

Have you noticed how your child holds their pen & pencil? For more information contact me at elaine@hummingbirdlearning.com

Dyslexia & Me: Richard Branson

At Hummingbird Learning Centre we always say that dyslexia is a wonderful thing – it’s just that it needs a different strategy for reading & writing.

I remember when the Virgin Megastore opened in Ireland. I was working in Dublin in the late 80’s early 90’s and it felt so cool,modern & kind of dangerous to be in there, browsing through the records. The store had caused all kinds of outrage because they were selling condoms openly on the counter, flouting the law at the time. The radio waves were jammed with moral condemnation, probably I suspect, to the delight of its owner, the maverick entrepreneur, Richard Branson.

Early in his life, Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Media, struggled with dyslexia. “I struggled with dyslexia when I was at school, long before it was widely known—my teachers just thought I was just stupid, lazy or both. Words just looked like jumbles of letters on the blackboard to me.”

Richard Branson has made a name for himself by mixing creative passion with business ideas. His first commercial success came after he founded his dream business: a record label. That company, called Virgin Records, produced the Mike Oldfield album “Tubular Bells,” which was later used in the film The Exorcist.

But that wasn’t Branson first business.  His first was a magazine that he started while still at school. The magazine was so successful that he left school early to continue with it.  I always think that this was incredible.  Here was a guy who struggled with reading and writing, yet he started a magazine, where his trade and tools were words!

In a blog post on Virgin’s website, Branson attributed the Virgin brand’s success to his dyslexia: “However, there are still many dyslexics out there, especially young people, who feel held back by their condition. I used my dyslexia to my advantage and learned to delegate those tasks I wasn’t so good it. This freed me up to look at the bigger picture, and is one of the main reasons I have been able to expand the Virgin brand into so many different areas.”

That ability to see the ‘big picture’ is one of the many positive attributes of dyslexia.

There are many, many talented dyslexics out there,” Branson wrote. “In fact, some of the most creative people happen to have the condition.”  One of his ‘big picture’ ideas really couldn’t be any bigger – he created a company to make commercial SPACE travel a reality!

In addition, Richard Branson owns his own train company, an airline, a media group and even a Caribbean island, but it’s not all about making money.  He takes a different approach to customer care.  He advocates for looking after your staff first, then they will look after the customers. “I have always believed that the way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers, and that people flourish when they are praised.” “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”

Branson also knows the value of making mistakes, something people who do dyslexia often find difficult: “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over. You learn by doing, and by falling over, and it’s because you fall over that you learn to save yourself from falling over.

He credits dyslexia with another of his signature management techniques: the habit of always taking notes. He writes in his 2014 book “The Virgin Way” that he learned as a child that if he ever had a chance at remembering anything, he’d need to jot it down. To this day, he says he carries a notebook everywhere.

The handwritten note habit has come in handy in management, negotiation, and even legal situations — he’s submitted his notebooks as evidence in lawsuits, he says.

It’s one of the “most powerful tools” in his “bag of business tricks,” Branson writes.

Dyslexia, Branson claims, actually made him a better manager, he wrote in his 2012 book “Like a Virgin,” and it became what he considers his “greatest strength.”

October is Dyslexia Awareness Month

Why Meaning is So Important for Spelling

When my boys were in primary school, they had an English book that was used for reading and spelling.  It was different to the type of reader that I had in school (who is old enough to remember the Maura, Seán and Rusty books).  Their English book was more of a workbook.  Along the left hand side were random words chosen simply because they were phonetically similar. Spelling homework was to learn off the words.  It was pretty easy to remember them, in the short term, because they all had the same sound.

Understanding what the word meant wasn’t really part of the process, but without meaning, learning how to spell the word is worthless.  Being able to use the word again, in the appropriate context, is an essential part of learning to spell. It is also an important aid in reading and composition. Why else would we need to do it?

In order to understand what a word means you have to either make a visual still image of it or create a contextual mini movie in your memory.  Creating this means that in the future when reading the word, for a fraction of a nano-second, that image pops back into your head and you have understanding.

This skill allows you to expand your vocabulary and comprehension.  It allows you learn new languages quickly and easily. Like all skills it must be learned and honed.  Controlling your images for spelling and comprehension is essential.  It is easy to make an image for nouns.  Imagine a dog – easy.  For abstract words it is more complicated but once mastered it too becomes easy.  This is where internal mini movies come into their own.

A good Thesaurus dictionary is a vital item in every home.  I think they are a wonderful way to connect words of similar meaning to the same internal image. If you come across a new word to spell and are unsure of the meaning, look it up in the Thesaurus.  Chances are that you already have an internal picture of another word that has a similar meaning to the new word.  Now all you do is tag the new word on to the same image.

Some skills are learned to do something that lasts for a short period of time.  Learning how to put meaning behind every word is a skill that will make spelling easy for the rest of your life.

Elaine Sparling is the creator of the Hummingbird Learning Method® and is about to launch the popular Secrets to Successful Spelling™ workshop, online, at the end of August. Based in Adare, Co Limerick, where she works with clients on a one to one basis, she can be contacted on 087-2996054 or through their website http://www.hummingbirdlearning.com

Use Your Brain For a Change

One of my favourite quotes is by Dr Richard Bandler and it is “When you want new results, it requires new thinking”.  Thinking is just something we do.  We are always thinking about something.  Even when we are asleep our brain is still working.

We are born with this amazing inbuilt computer but unfortunately it didn’t come with a set of instructions.  We have to learn how to use it as we go along and mostly we use it out of habits we have formed from watching and listening to others, so if we want to change those habits we have to think differently and to think differently we have to use our brain to get that change.

Your Brain

There is a lot of talk about people being right-brained and left-brained.  You might have taken one of those quizzes online to determine which you are.  The assumption is that a person who is ‘left-brained’ is more logical, analytical and objective and suitable for jobs such as accountant, solicitor or programmer.  The ‘right-brained’ person is said to be more creative, intuitive, thoughtful and subjective and might want to be an actor, graphic designer or therapist.

The reality is that people are not one or the other, they are not ‘right-brained’ or ‘left-brained’.  The theory grew out of the work of Nobel Prize winner Roger W Sperry.  He discovered that cutting the corpus callosum, the structure that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, reduced or eliminated seizures in people with epilepsy.

However, patients who had undergone the procedure also had new symptoms after the communication pathway between the two sides of the brain was cut. Some patients found that they could no longer name objects that were processed by the right side of the brain, yet they could still name objects processed by the left side of the brain. This led Sperry to suggest that language was controlled by the left side of the brain.

However, later research has shown that the brain is not nearly as neatly divided as this. The brain actually works best when both sides of the brain are engaged at the same time. Neuroscientists have found that the two sides of the brain work together to perform a wide variety of tasks and the two sides communicate through the corpus callosum.

In a study of over 1000 participants by the University of Utah, it was revealed that while activity was sometimes higher on one side or the other in certain critical regions, on average both sides of the brain were essentially equal in their activity. Dr Jeff Anderson, the study’s lead researcher explains “It’s absolutely true that some brain functions occur in one or other side of the brain. Language tends to be on the left, attention more to the right, but people don’t tend to have a stronger left or right sided brain network.  It seems to be determined more connection by connection”.

This makes the corpus callosum key in using our brain to evoke and strengthen new thinking.  Mid line exercises help to make those connections.  We need both sides of our brain working together to create strong neuropathways, making focus and recall much better and easier.

So the next time you take one of those quizzes, know that it’s just a bit of fun. Now I must go and check my horoscope.

Time to Ditch the Highlighter

Highlighters, they come is such pretty colours; yellow, pink, blue, green, orange. And they’re so handy aren’t they?  Instead of underlining the important part of a text, you can simply highlight it and it pops out of the page making it so easy for revision – or at least that’s the theory.

In reality, almost the entire sentence gets highlighted. Everything seems important and it’s easier just to highlight every word.  Next the entire paragraph is highlighted and before you know it almost the entire chapter is highlighted.  In order to break it up a bit, you use different coloured highlighters for different sections. The overall result is that every word in the entire chapter now is important, must be learned and that can be overwhelming.

Instead of being an aid to study, highlighting creates stress and can actually become an impediment to studying.  In a report by the Association for Psychological Science, the authors, led by Kent State University professor John Dunlosky, examined 10 learning strategies and found that highlighting was one of the most ineffective methods.

Studies showed that they offer no benefit beyond simply reading the text. Some research even indicated that highlighting can get in the way of learning; because it draws attention to individual facts, it may hamper the process of making connections and drawing inferences.

When students highlight, they tend to highlight the entire sentence because they need to read every word in order for it to make sense to them. If they were to focus on the meaning, making mental images & movies, then the main ideas would be easier to recall.

I teach our hummingbirds to create mental images that make it easy to recall information.   Once these images have been created and are clear and strong, then we break them down into keywords or buzzwords as we call them.  These single word buzzwords are so strong that they allow the student to recall all of the detail that goes with those single words.

When coupled with a good note taking technique, the list of buzzwords makes revision really easy.   Instead of being faced with page after page of highlighted words and being overwhelmed by them, the student simply has a list of single words, all of which easily bring to mind the information required.  Study becomes much easier and less time consuming, meaning that the student can revise more often, ensuring that the information goes from the short term memory into the long term memory.

Perhaps it’s time to ditch the highlighter.

Elaine Sparling is the founder & CEO of the award winning Hummingbird Learning Centre, based in Adare Co Limerick.  She can be contacted at elaine@hummingbirdlearning.com , 087-2996054 or through her website http://www.hummingbirdlearning.com