Handhelds and Penmanship
The Handheld program Giraffe has been instrumental in improving the penmanship of my Third Graders!
We teachers have noticed for quite a few years that the penmanship of our new classes has been neglected. Children are holding a regular pencil at a much earlier age nowadays, and once they establish a habit of gripping the pencil incorrectly, you can’t get them to correct that grip for love nor money. This issue interfers with their ability to form cursive letters correctly. Children who are making the letter o or a in a clockwise motion have a very difficult time forming an unbroken chain of letters when learning cursive.
I used the Giraffe program initially to give my children practice with grafitti 2 on the handhelds. In Giraffe, the object is to form the letter in the graffiti writing area before the letter drops down to the bottom of the screen. If the letter is written with the wrong strokes in graffiti, the falling letter does not “pop” and your score does not build. The only way to build your score is to form letters correctly and beat their progress towards the bottom of the screen. It does not take long before the child is well aware of the exact strokes that make a letter disappear. Correct practice equals high score!
An interesting, and productive use for Giraffe!
Janet,
I really liked your idea of using Giraffe to improve handwriting.Some of my students also have trouble in cursive and the main factor is that many of them have not even mastered print very well. Transition from cursive to print has not been easy for a handful of my students. I have a particular student who is still having difficulity writing the letter b and d in lower case. Flipping the letter is still an issue, and I think that Giraffe would be excellent practice for this student. Thanks for the idea!
This is an excellent reflection and analysis of Graffiti on the Palm and using Giraffe to practice. I wonder if there has been any formal study on this topic. Have you done any searching on-line in this area? It would seem like an interesting study, if there were one.