Teaching handwriting skills to children with intellectual disabilities using an adapted handwriting programme

Abstract

Children with intellectual disabilities often struggle with handwriting, but there is very little research to inform intervention approaches. In this study, we developed a teaching manual based on Handwriting Without Tears®, a comprehensive handwriting programme designed for typically developing children. Three children with intellectual disabilities participated in the study and received handwriting instruction based on the manual three times a week over a 32‐week period. Our aims were to explore whether Handwriting Without Tears® can be used as a comprehensive handwriting curriculum for children with intellectual disabilities and to evaluate improvement in handwriting skills. We found that the intervention was successfully incorporated into small group teaching sessions within the child's regular classroom, and that all three children made improvements. Our data show promising results and support the need for larger evaluation studies.

Implementation of an adapted Handwriting Without Tears® programme for children with developmental disabilities in a special education setting

“…Additionally, visual prompting strategies like "grey blocks" and double lines to write on are used to support letter placement and sizing. Grindle et al (2018) developed an adapted version of the curriculum (a-HWT) for children with developmental disabilities. Teaching plans were drawn from the Readiness & Writing Pre-K Teacher's Guide (Olsen and Knapton, 2016) and Letters and Numbers for Me Kindergarten Teacher's Guide (Olsen, 2013) as these were considered to be most appropriate for children in UK school years Foundation and Year 1, respectively.…”

“…This limits the assumptions that can be made about the effectiveness of using HWT for teaching children in small groups. Grindle et al (2018) used an adapted version of HWT (a-HWT) with children with developmental disabilities who were taught in small groups. The a-HWT was adapted to suit these children in several ways, for example as a "catch up" curriculum where only the components deemed as essential were included (e.g.…”

Creating effective teaching and learning environments: Building a positive behavioural support (PBS) model for UK special schools

“…Targeted academic supports include providing additional support to small groups of pupils who are having difficulty with whole class teaching in specific subjects—this may be simply by providing small group teaching in which tasks are broken down into smaller and more manageable tasks or by using an intervention specifically designed for pupils in a subject area such as Handwriting without Tears® for handwriting skills (Grindle et al., 2017) or Mathletics for numeracy skills (Nansen et al., 2012).…”

“…Academic interventions are selected for pupils who are not making expected progress within core areas of the curriculum through typical universal supports. Focused subject‐specific interventions may be delivered such as Handwriting without Tears® (Grindle et al., 2017) or the Headsprout Early Reading® programme (Grindle et al., 2021; Tyler et al., 2015) either in small groups or on a 1:1 basis. Other examples include adding additional structure into a young person's day through a personalised timetable, the development of more structured learning plans than are required at the universal level and altering the frequency with which pupils engage with specific elements of teaching/areas of the curriculum or increased access to subject‐specialist teachers.…”

Graphomotor Skills of Students with Mild Intellectual Disability

“…A diagnosis of an intellectual disability often involves specific motor impairments, which are likely to contribute to deficits in handwriting skills. Children with an intellectual disability demonstrated poor co-ordination of fine motor movement and tended to use a tighter or stronger grip than was required when using a precision grip (Grindle et al, 2017).…”