Cognitive skills, such as visual perception skills and phonological awareness, and handwriting skills are closely related to the development of literacy and school performance. This is why it is very important for a child to start developing them already in the preschool period through different experiences. The latter are often limited in families with a lower social-economic status as a consequence of a less encouraging environment, which is the consequence of parents’ lower education level and lower financial capacity. Children coming from a less stimulating environment due to poverty thus often have more inadequately developed skills (graphomotor skills, phonologic awareness, aural and visual perception, etc.), which are essential for developing handwriting. Early evaluation of children’s writing skills and early treatment of children have thus got a really important role so that their problems do not escalate.
The purpose of this MA thesis is to examine the influence of practise on writing skills – specific cognitive skills and handwriting skills, through a case study. A student from year 2, who comes from a less stimulating environment due to poverty and has got difficulties when it comes to writing according to her teacher’s opinion, was the object of this study. With the help of individual subtests of diagnostic tests ACADIA, SNAP and the Test for recognizing reading and writing disabilities, together with a dictation and independent writing, we discovered that, before the beginning of training, the student had the most issues with graphomotor skills and with phonologic awareness. The training was done in 16 meetings and every meeting lasted for one school lesson (45 minutes). After the training we administered the same tests during the final testing and then compared the initial and the final results. We discovered that the student improved her phonologic awareness, but she did not improve her graphomotor skills to a desirable extent. A longer and a more intense training would be necessary for the improvement of the said areas. The results show how important it is to help children from a less stimulating environment due to poverty.
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