During the initial literacy instruction phase, which is a lengthy process of learning to read and write,children's pre-writing skills are intensively developed, as they are essential to the development of functional literacy. Many preschoolers and first graders experience difficulties in acquiring writing skills, including frequent difficulties in developing graphomotor skills. Pupils with such difficulties can be helped with a variety of individually targeted programs.
In our master's thesis, we wanted to find out how to contribute to the improvement of the graphomotor skills of a selected pupil who has difficulties in this area. In the empirical part of the research, we conducted a case study and implemented an adapted perceptual-motor program Write from the Start by Teodorescu and Addy (1996) to improve prescriptive skills. The goal of the program was to improve the pupil's handwriting through graphomotor exercises specifically designed to develop muscles and improve the pupil's control of the pencil, as well as to develop or improve the child's perceptual skills necessary for proper letter alignment and organization of written content. The aim of the study was to implement this training, evaluate its effectiveness, and investigate the possibility of transferring it to the Slovenian school environment. In addition, the program was to be presented and special and rehabilitation teachers and other professionals were encouraged to use it. Information about the pupil's prescriptive abilities was obtained before and after the perceptual-motor training through a questionnaire for the pupil's classroom teacher, certain subtests of the tests ACADIA, SNAP and T-MBP, Assessment of motor differentiation of fingers, Evaluation of the quality of line drawing, Test of reproduction of chopstick models, informal tests and observation of the pupil and his written work were obtained. Then, the pupil was involved in the designed perceptual-motor program, which included spatial perception, spatial organization, paper orientation and direction, hand–eye coordination, linear control, pencil grip, and posture while writing. The program consisted of a total of 20 sessions held two to three times per week for 45 minutes each in a separate room at the student's school. The sessions included initial warm-up exercises and selected worksheets from the Write from the Start program. By analyzing and comparing the pupil's initial and final results, we were able to confirm the partial success of the training conducted. The pupil's performance improved significantly in terms of eye-hand coordination, pencil grip, posture, and pressure on the writing surface. The pupil's linear control of the pencil and spatial and paper orientation also improved. However, the pupil did not improve in eye movement coordination and tracking, orientation to another person, and fluency. Although this is a case study with a small sample, the results suggest positive effects of the implemented perceptual-motor program on the pupil's prescriptive skills. This supports the transferability of the program to the Slovenian school setting and opens up multiple possibilities for its application in special education practice.
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