Our occupational therapy appointment was more like a play date, as evidenced by Galen telling me in the car that he wanted to come back and play with Chad again the next day. Chad is, obviously, the therapist. We were assigned to him because he's their handwriting expert, and that was a big part of the reason for the evaluation in the first place.
It turns out that Galen is right on target for his age in fine motor skills - perhaps a little ahead in a couple tasks, but not enough to be considered on target for 5 to 5.5. Sounds good to me, and it was what I expected. He's definitely left-handed, with a pretty strong preference. Again, this is what I expected, although he frequently chooses to use scissors in his right hand which had me wondering.
It turns out that we've been doing several things exactly the way we should, including the use of standard thickness writing implements instead of the extra-thick ones they often give kids his age, and using ones that are about half the normal length. Chad also had good things to say about the Kumon workbooks I've been using, other than to note that the cutting books are set up for right-handed children if you follow their "start here" arrows (I tend to ignore those and let Galen decide which end to start at).
On the "we should change this" side, he recommended we ditch the rubber pencil grip. The other things we're doing, plus a couple new ideas he gave me will be far more effective in helping him develop a proper grip. He also asked me to consider switching from Zaner-Bloser handwriting to Handwriting Without Tears. I had originally decided against HWT because the script is unattractive, and there's very little repetition to develop muscle memory. Apparently, the repetition issue is part of the reason HWT was developed - fewer repetitions, but the ones you do are more likely to be correct, making for better learning. That was enough to get me to at least think about it. His response to my comment about the unattractive script was that it was just a font, and once the basic skills were learned it was a simple matter to learn a new style. I may have to get back to him on that in a few years, because I'm not going to have any idea when and how to do that. He did say to go ahead and use the Zaner-Bloser Kindergarten book to start practicing uppercase letters, so I'll keep that and order HWT for the rest.
At one point he told Galen he was a "superstar" because he was doing really well on one of the tasks, and Galen tells him, "That's not what mommy calls me." I'm sitting a few feet away wondering which of my pet names for him he's going to pull out, when he says, "Mommy calls me a 'smart little boy.'" The grin on my face must have met in the back of my head. After all, he could have told Chad I sometimes call him "cutie buns."
Do not worry about the scissors thing with Galen. Left-handed kids tend to be more ambidexterous and it may be that if he used scissors in other settings, he found that the left hand scissors didnt' work as well for him as the right handed scissors. I am left handed, but when it comes to cutting with scissors, I used right handed scissors because they 1) always worked better for me and 2) were always around.
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