Colouring

I think you would need to post the ages of your children and the specific problems you are seeing. Is coloring inside the lines the only problem they have with fine motor skills?

Nancy

Coloring is one of those early elementary school tasks that teachers think are fun but kids with motor skills issues loathe and find stressful. For them, it is a little like if we were trying to color in a map holding a crayon between our toes. Its possible to do, but boy is it tiring! It is possible that occupational therapy will help with the motor skills, but there is absolutely NO educational value to coloring and I think you should ask for your children to be excused from the requirement.

I agree that there is no value to coloring in pictures ala coloring books but tend to disagree on maps and diagrams. There are some excellent “coloring book” manuals on things like anatomy and oceanography and you really learn a lot on this. Nevertheless, to a kid with dysgraphia I think the amount learned may be less than the amount of struggle.

I am doing the manuscript writing part of Handwriting without tears. The kid I am working with is now really excited to be able to color in things. I was most surprised at that reaction, I didn’t expect this to be quite the big deal it is to him. Perhaps with failure in multiple areas a small success like this is sweeter.

(You would understand that the Handwriting without tears is a remediating program for handwriting so I don’t know about it’s use to just improve coloring in lines. I’d say leave it out. Perhaps they can use the diagrams differently, such as putting different types of stickers, labels, etc in the different countries say.

—des