By Luca Canever – TAGteach Faculty
TAGteach at school has proven to an effective technology in many different areas of application, especially when teachers have to deal with basic skills. Skills that students need to manager in order to have access (and learn) more complex behaviors. In this article we will talk about writing, and we will give you some examples of how we have applied TAGteach.
Proper Pen Grip
Many students have a “wrong” pen holding: this might cause problems in writing with students complaining: “I do not like to write!” or “I can not write!” What these students are missing are some basic skills in writing: Do we want to have students that not only enjoy writing , but that are also good at that? We can think to start to teach them how to properly use the pen. With TAGteach it’s pretty easy.
These three pictures show you the tag point that I, and other colleagues, have used.
In this video Joan Orr shows you the whole sequence:
Personally I have used these tag points with every possible student: from kindergarten to high school. What I found really helpful is to ask to the students (once they can perform this skill fluently) “What would you call that position of the pen?”. Their answers became a cue that I could use to remind them the correct position when needed without nagging.
Paper Positioning
Look at this video by Anne Wormald:
Where and how to position the notebook is another basic skill that needs to be mastered, because this will give us good posture and a more comfortable writing experience.
A Tale of Success – Dysgraphia
One of my students had some light cognitive problems. Also, he wrote in a disorderly manner. Instead of using some fallback strategies (write in capital letters, or writing with your computer) I decided to have him practice his writing skills more. So I asked him to write in cursive. He had no problem with that, but I noticed that he could not keep the words on the line.
The picture shows the first session we did together. The red line shows what was his “standard” writing. Notice all those up and down? The blue line shows where I started using TAGteach (the tag point is: “Letters on the line”. You can see the intervention highlighted by the green line. After that I left him practicing by himself. We can see clearly how effective was that small intervention.
Fifteen days after this intervention, the writing was still stable on the line, without me having to do other sessions. Not only that, I also noticed that he was also getting better in writing his ideas with much more organization than before. It looked like being able to write in an orderly way, placing the words on the line, helped him to process and write his ideas with better organization.
More from Luca
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