Handwriting

Why Is Cursive Such a Good Visual Motor Skill? 

Handwriting can be a complex skill. It requires your child to be able to form letters with consistent proportions, size, and spacing so other people can read the sentences and words. It takes complex visual perceptual skills to produce legible handwriting as well as motor skill integration. A visual motor integration deficiency might be evident if you’re seeing poor quality handwriting in your child.

Visual-motor integration is important for coordination activities. If you don’t perceive the visually presented information properly, the muscles will receive inaccurate messages that result in inappropriate motor responses. In handwriting, visual motor skills play an essential role. Visual-motor integration skills are related to being able to legibly copy letters.

Also, with written assignments, decreased visual-motor integration might contribute to the poor spatial organization of written work too.

How Cursive Writing Plays a Role

There are various benefits of learning cursive writing, with a couple of being:

Develop Motor Skills

One important benefit of cursive writing is it helps to develop motor skills. With cursive writing, your child uses a different skill set than they do with printing. They use their hand muscles in a distinct way. And, it also activates a distinct area of your child’s brain than writing in print.

With cursive writing, your child’s movements are continuously variable and demand more of their mental ability than when they make single strokes while printing. 

Helps with Hand-Eye Coordination

Another benefit is it helps to develop hand-eye coordination. Cursive writing encourages thinking that requires certain hand-eye coordination that’s not the same for every letter.

If your child struggles with fine motor skills that are important for handwriting proficiency, you should speak with their pediatric occupational therapist to see what help you can provide them for developing these skills.

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