My child has trouble seeing and we want to teach him how to form letters. This is kind of a life lesson for us too.

Parenting note: It’s my goal to keep the ratio of parenting posts fairly low on the blog overall. but the next few weeks may be an exception as I’m home with Noah (9) and Liam (4). 

Liam’s still recovering from cataract surgery, but try telling him that. As far as he’s concerned any attempts to keep him from injuring his eye (he had a lens implanted) are just crazy grown-up talk. It’s also been a rough road to diagnosis for my little crazy-active guy; part of us coming to terms with how poor his vision has been (and may stay, if his brain doesn’t re-adjust) has been to realize that when he says he hates writing or hates drawing, or simply gets up and runs around, he’s frustrated by real things.

I would have thought that after a lifetime of working to take my own experience seriously I would have remembered a little better that in children particularly, behaviour is often its own language. Liam of course has no idea how other people see, and wouldn’t know how to express it if he did, and so for him letters and numbers have been dancing around helter-skelter and he just thought that’s how it is.

Here’s the activity that brought it home; he asked me to write the first row and then went to continue the set. I’m pretty sure this is how he sees. I have gently tested him since and it looks like he knows how to write his numbers and letters, as long as you do not care whether they are oriented in space in any way – he reverses, flips upside down, misses big chunks or writes over prior letters:

While we’re home I’m trying to boost his confidence a bit. I’d also like him to learn how to read and write, you know, in his life, and since I have this gift of time I figured why not haul out some of the strategies I learned way back when I was an ed assistant for the TDSB way back when.

How to teach letters using a sugar tray

By the time I was working with kids in elementary school with this kind of trouble, they were usually pretty wriggly and oppositional when it came to writing their letters, which makes me wish I’d spotted the same in my kid (although a lot of 4 year olds just are.)

This exercise combines the sugar drug with removing some of the barriers to forming letters (how kids hold the pen, the drag of pencil or crayon on paper) and also allows for quick erasure of any mistakes with a shake. In my completely unscientific and untrained observation, making sure the child or student isn’t staring at his or her own mistakes for too long is important, because it reinforces the reversal in their minds. Also, it’s discouraging.

The other bonus: The more times you write a letter the more times you get to lick your finger in between. Strong incentive to keep going, at least if you have my kid.

With Liam, I get him to point his pointer finger (although he prefers using his thumb) and we do the letter from the top together, to help him develop the arm feel/muscle memory for the movements. Then he writes that letter on his own. He’s into it.

Materials:

Cake pan
Sugar

Caution: Yes, it’s awful to use sugar to teach your children. I used to be very anti-bribery too. You can totally use sand, just don’t lick.

There’s lots of parenting stuff here but I am reminded too that often we attribute success or failure to attitude rather than to actual systemic issues, especially when it comes to kids and teens.