Scribbling

You can see that he traced the capital "G" in green, yellow, and purple, and wrote his own "G" in orange before scribbling.

(the red "g" on the bottom was written by his classmate)

            The past few days, I have seen my student J make great strides towards controlling him impulsive behavior.  After talking it out with Jen during our M.Ed. class last week, I realized that J just needs to scribble.  He did not attend preschool and his mom quickly mentioned on the first day of school that he had some shoulder injury that left him without full control of his right hand causing him to suddenly become a lefty. 

            Every day, we do letter formation with a new letter each day.  The students are supposed to follow along with the teacher on the overhead and trace each letter three times then try the letter themselves.  After tracing a few times, J usually resort to scribbling across his entire paper until there are few white spaces left.  I caught on to this and began standing next to him when I felt like he was going to scribble so I could tell him to wait and not do anything until we moved on to the next letter.  He responded well to this and was able to wait for the group to finish tracing without scribbling/coloring all over his paper however I felt as though I was limiting his expression and actions.

            Then one day I realized: he just needs to scribble, as a lefty.  I always hated in junior high when teachers would have us write our daily journal with our non-dominant hand for some reason because I had no control over what I was doing.  Everything felt so backwards and unnatural and there was almost no way for me to start writing well-formed letters let alone entire paragraphs.  This is what J has been experiencing every day.  Sure, he’s only 4 so it’s not like he has that many years of experience at being a righty under his belt but its still significant that all of a sudden he was forced into becoming a lefty.  He gets very discouraged whenever he feels like he cannot write something and that is the moment when he acts out by throwing things, wandering around the class, talking to his neighbor, scribbling, etc.  He is avoiding failure.  He is avoiding doing something that feels strange to him and also, through scribbling, is practicing his gross motor skills with his left hand which is crucial to do before he can even think about his fine motor skills of writing with a pencil.  So I’m not really sure if I am going to discourage his scribbling or maybe just try and redirect it.  I’ll keep you updated.