In this episode of The Writing Glitch, Cheri Dotterer dives into the intricate connections between reading, writing, and neurology. Drawing from her personal journey and research, she explores how foundational sensory and motor skills influence writing development. Cheri also reviews two innovative tools from Real OT Solutions that support children struggling with dysgraphia and other writing challenges. Tune in to gain insights into how writing evolves from early childhood scribbles to structured sentences and how to bridge the gap for students with writing difficulties.
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GUEST RESOURCES
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TIMESTAMPS
3:15 - Neurological Foundations of Writing: Biomechanical, Language, and Cognitive Levels
10:45 - Phonological Awareness and the Writing Process
15:30 - Challenges of Dysgraphia: Sensory and Motor Barriers
20:00 - Product Review: Real OT Solutions’ Size Matters Handwriting Program
27:50 - Practical Tools: Alpha Triangle and Writing Line Names
32:30 - Invitation to Cheri's Monthly Free Webinar
35:00 - Closing Remarks and Encouragement
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BOOKS
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SUBSCRIBE and LISTEN to the Audio version of the podcast here on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.
YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@TheWritingGlitchPodcast
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MISSION
Dotterer Educational Consulting, a Therapy Services, LLC company: To provide professional development to improve writing skills through efficient lesson planning for regular education classrooms.
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Other ways to connect with Cheri
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QUESTION
What is your biggest struggle in your classroom right now? Include grade level and your role. Share in the comments or email us at:
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HASHTAGS
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Creators & Guests
Host
Cheri Dotterer
Cheri is an international speaker, author, and consultant who helps teachers, therapists, and parents build clarity, community, and competency around the barriers to writing success. Her book, Handwriting Brain-Body DisConnect, has remained in the Top 100 on Amazon since publication in Handwriting Reference and Learning Disabilities. It was also a Top 10 Finalist in the Author Academy Awards in 2019. In addition, she was nominated the USA 2022 Dysgraphia Expert of the Year by Global Health and Pharma Magazine. She has worked in many concentration areas as an occupational therapist for 30 years. However, it wasn't until starting her private practice that she found her passion for helping others understand this disability. In addition, she has been an adjunct instructor at several universities. She lives with her husband of 32 years. They have two adult children. Her heroes are Evelyn Yerger, her grandmother, and Esther, Queen of Susa. Together, we can grow 110 million leaders and hack dysgraphia by building skills, applying knowledge, and transcending futures.
What is The Writing Glitch: Hack Dysgraphia No Pencil Required?
The Writing Glitch is brought to you by Dotterer Educational Consulting. Our Founder and Owner, Cheri Dotterer, is the host.
Build courage, compassion, and collaboration to help students thrive and grow leaders that transcend a lifetime, regardless of dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia, using sensory-motor processing and neuroscience-based instructional interventions. No Pencil Required!
We interview teachers, therapists, and parents about how they have seen a transformation in children having these disabilities and co-morbid conditions such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). They share how they help students grow and prosper.
We believe we can grow 110 million leaders together by building skills, applying knowledge, and transcending futures. Join us to hack dysgraphia. No Pencil Required.
Each episode contains one intervention to help you support students with writing challenges the next day you are in your classroom. These interventions are explicit, systematic, cumulative, and multisensory. They are designed to support ALL students through targeted, daily visual-perceptual, visual-motor, and memory interventions. These interventions benefit all students and harm none.
All students have access to writing regardless of their status in the classroom. The interventions were created to take up to 30 seconds to 2 minutes of your classroom time. Strategic lesson planning increases classroom engagement.
All interventions can be adapted for students with physical disabilities because they support the Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) and well-being of all students. In addition, these interventions impact all subject matter classrooms. Whether you are teaching English language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, music, or art, these interventions will benefit your classroom atmosphere across ALL grade levels.
You have put your blood, sweat, and tears into investing in your education and children. Don’t let a misunderstanding about this disability stop you from providing best practices.
In case you don’t know me. I’m Cheri Dotterer, 2022 Dysgraphia Expert of the Year. This honor was bestowed on me by Global Health and Pharma Magazine. In 2023, they awarded my company the Best Dysgraphia Professional Development Program.
It took challenges at home and on the job to wake me up to the impact dysgraphia has on all students. Struggling my entire life with communication issues, I was mistaken that only students with learning disabilities could have dysgraphia.
My thoughts shifted when my gifted daughter asked for help with spelling. My son struggles with handwriting. Then, a parent asked me why her child could read and have trouble writing. Finding answers became the drive that gets me out of bed in the morning.
It’s a big shock when you discover how pervasive writing difficulties are and how little people know about how to help–even OTs. I used to think I was the only OT who struggled with understanding dysgraphia. It turns out many have questions.
Occupational, physical, and speech therapists are not trained to teach. Teachers are.
Occupational, speech, and physical therapists are trained in neuroscience. Teachers are not.
Let this podcast be your first line of defense to help your students transcend their learning disabilities. Show your school district how much you genuinely care about all of your students by sharing it with your colleagues.
After each episode, I challenge you to share your key takeaway from the podcast in our FREE yet private community. Share your student wins. Get support on the challenges.
Join The Writing Glitch Community. https://thewritingglitch.com/
Connect with Cheri at www.cheridotterer.com or info@thewritingglitch.com
Cheri Dotterer 0:00
Everybody, welcome to the writing glitch. I'm Cheri Dotterer, your classroom coach. Today, we're going to be sharing a little bit about writing and reading, and we're going to be doing a product review today. So stay tuned, and let's find out a little bit more about reading and writing. Back in 2016 I decided I wanted to write a book, kind of summarizing the research that I had been doing and trying to figure out what happened with my daughter and a student of mine. So here's the backstory. My daughter came to me one night, and she's like, I can't under I can't spell, Mommy, I can't spell. She's in fifth grade at the time, in tears, and this is my gifted child who was reading above grade level but complaining about being able to spell for her spelling test. Now mind you, every single spelling test up to this point was 100% so we had one word that was going to knock her perfect score away. So we had a perfection issue. So mind you that that was part of what was going on, okay, but she's complaining about spelling. My student was struggling with spelling, who I was doing the evaluation report on, and I was like, wait a minute, there is some kind of disconnect, and there's some kind of connection here that I have not been taught before. And so it took me on this path of, what is the difference between reading writing and what? Why are they not the same? What I found out was the building blocks of reading, incological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and there's three types of vocabulary, there's oral, there's red, and there's written. Now we have reading fluency and reading comprehension. Now when I look at that, and I looking at it from a neurological perspective, phonological awareness is when we're here speaking, and we're taking in what's being said around us, and it's making those identifications between say, nouns, like objects, things, people, and what the word sounds like. So the phonological awareness is this awareness that cup and cup, the physical Cup and the sound and the word cup go together. What happens with kids that are struggling is they don't have that awareness, especially of the vowel sounds. They can't understand where that vowel comes in. So see you, is really for them just C, and then there's a P on the N, and we have to break that down so that they realize that there's three sounds, not just two. The phonics is where we're actually applying the symbols known as letters to the sounds that we're making. So taking the symbol letter A putting it with Apple, are where, that's where phonics comes in, and then vocabulary actually, when it's written, it is actually a different process. Oral is actually a different process. So oral communication is a motor function. Reading it is is a sensory function. Writing, it is a secondary motor function. Reading flip, flip, yeah, I can say it. Reading Fluency is a motor function, oral function. Reading Comprehension could be both, because you can do an oral comprehension and you can do a written comprehension. So when we take these things together, it's this mix of sensory and motor processes, and we develop the reading parts, the sensory parts First, the motor parts are coming second. A lot of kids struggle with the writing because it's a secondary neuro pathway, and they don't understand some of the nuances behind writing, the nuances behind writing, they start when they're a toddler, and they finally get something in their hand, and they just kind of Put this mark on the page, and then they'll start to scribble, still on this toddler stage. And it's not till we get to the pre writing stage, where we actually have this conscious effort to start and stop a line of some sort on the page, we start. Usually with a square will go to a cross because they're they're even lines will eventually head to a circle, and the diagonal is last. And part of the reason the diagonals last is because it's the hardest shape to make. It forces you to cross midline, and so getting both sides of the brain in function to do the writing, well, that's an extra little neurological connection that needs to be made. It's only after we understand how to start and stop and create shapes that we can actually create letters. So that's where the letter and shape formation comes in. Then we have to apply it to what this stuff is that's going on here that we're reading, and create phonemic awareness and phonological awareness to our writing. And then we have syllabic we have to put syllables together. And then we can have conversational writing, which is more like writing a sentence to writing paragraphs. It takes until we're like 11 to 14 to be able to get through that stage. It's only when kids can get through those basic stages of writing that we can actually move them on to more difficult aspects of writing, which they need to use in school. We also have the whole neurological sensory thing going on, so I try to apply it to dysgraphia when I was doing my research and based, this is not just my research, this is based on some neurology research that I found that we have this aspect that is just sensory in nature. That's the visual there is auditory involved. So that visual, auditory, sensory part, we also have to have memory, to remember what it is that was going on, sensory wise, and then we have to apply that motor What I've discovered is kids that are struggling with writing and have Motor Dysgraphia as the part of their diagnosis. Many times there's another neurological diagnosis going on that is interfering with their ability to write, and that's what's causing the Motor Dysgraphia is not just directly related. So keep that in mind. But all of these areas all kind of flow together word formation, basically, that's creating vocabulary. It's spelling and those aspects, putting words letters together to create words is very difficult for some kids these and then we have sentence formation, and then we have paragraph formation. These three levels that I have here are intentionally made like that. The bottom level is definitely a neurobiological base. It's biomechanical. It is the basic functions that we have to have our nerves and our brain doing to be able to even get to that second level. That second level is language based, so we have to get all the language based parts of our brain working together, and then the top level is much more cognitive, and that's where we get all, all of the brain working together. So it's broken down in basic neurological development, where we have three aspects. We have the biomechanical, we have the language, we have the cognitive. The reason I am taking some time to go over this is probably I never did do this with the podcast before, and I wanted you to understand when I talk about the writing glitch, no pencil required, I am talking about these basic foundational neurological areas that the pencil isn't even required to write anything down. And if you're going to have dysgraphia, what happens with the pencil is secondary in nature. It's it's really the visual, spatial understanding and the memory that are going to be creating the the gap, getting it down on paper is a secondary barrier. A little bit more about the product review that I promised you I was going to do. So real ot solutions was created by Beverly Moskowitz, and
when she first published her her philosophy, she put it in a studio. Workbook, the Student Workbook looks like this.
She has several rules that she has teaches the students. The first rule is writing line names she has the top line, the dotted line, and the bottom line, and then on the left, she has go, and on the right, she has a checkered flag, so you go around to the next line. What she was noticing was that if we used green on the left and red on the right, kids stopped, even if it was in the middle of the sentence, it meant Stop it meant stop writing. There are a lot of other programs out there that call the top line the dotted line and the bottom line by different titles. And so she was trying to make it simple and easy for the students. Then she has letter line names, so she has standing tall line, line, flat line, slant, line, C, line, clock lines and smiley face lines.
This is more information about those then she has starting points and initial lines. So she was trying to teach the kids a sequential formation into creating those lines, and she has touch points. And touch points really are. Where are, where are the letters touching the top line, the dotted line and the bottom line? Are we accurately touching the lines where they're supposed to be? Or are we creating a problem? I can't get these pages of separated. There it goes.
Then she has some cartoons in here, and then she has this thing called the stars and dice game. And I thought this was brilliant. So as she has kids writing, she will have dry spaghetti and stickers for meatballs. So she will put spaghetti between the letters, and if there is one Spaghetti line within letters to a word that's correct, if they are too close together, and she can't even get a spaghetti between them, she reminds the students they're too close together. Or some students put things way far apart. And if she gets more than one spaghetti going there, she's like, that ends up to be like, two different words. So if you have a T, like the word today, we have a T, and then we have an O, way over here, what is T? Is that a word? So we try to help the kids by with their word spacing and letter spacing. The idea of the meatballs or the stickers, is that that the space between words, not so the idea of the dice is she will roll if she sees that letters or words are not effectively created, and they saw the student roll the dice, and then that's how Many times they have to practice the word or the the letter that they are they don't have quite right on the page. And she a lot of times will focus on letters rather than the entire word. And one thing about size matters handwriting program is it focuses on size rather than form. So even though she has a sequence that she is teaching the students, she's really focused on the size of the letters. Are they tall? Are they small? Are do they dive below the line? For lack of a better way to to put that, and so she has three sizes, all capitals and all tall. Let lowercase letters are size one, all smaller letters, like a, e, i, o and u, that go between the dotted line and the bottom line are all size two. And then there's five that go below the line, and that's g, j, p, q, y, so those are size three. She teaches the kids the different sizes, and we have to move on in our book. So. And then she gets to the beginning of of her workbook. And I'm just going to quickly glance it up here so you can see it. Each page has what sizes this letter? How many? And then there's three different questions in the letter in front of me is the letter F? So how many standing tall letters? How many line flat letters? How many slant letters? Slant lines are there in the letter? How many times does it touch the line? And then she has the kids, and gains the kids perspective, because she gives them a whole line of F's with only one correct on the page, and she has the kids decide which one is correct. Then we have practice line where she has the F written out and ready for them to trace. And then we have some lines below that that they can practice without having the trace, but they have this work sample above it. And each page has a little character in the corner, and that character is begins with the letter of whatever page that happens to be. I'm going to flip back here to lowercase letters. Basically they they do the same thing as they the capital letters, and that was the student workbook. Now, if you give me a moment, I'm going to head over to my other desk, and I want to share with you one of the other tools that she has. So give me a moment. Okay, I'm back here. We have one of her tools that she uses. Why are you? Okay? It is called maybe if I turn it this way, oh, maybe if I turn it this way, it is called the Alpha triangle. Alpha triangle really is a work sample that the students can have on their desk. What's nice about this triangle is it's made here and the triangle, the ACES triangle, which is what this is. I it has the right angle. So when they go to sit it on the desk and it's upside letters are all upside down for you, it's going to be upside down for the video. But if we lay that down on the on the table, it's the right angle for the child to see, one of the things about the desk strips is it forces the kids to look down too far, and it's not at a good writing angle. So that's what nice about this. So they have she has A through M on one side. She has a little note down here on the end for the size of the letters and the code. So you can see, all the pink are size one. All the the size two are in yellow, and the size three are in blue. It looks like and let's see here we have N through Z and then what's really cool is we have an A ruler on this side, and each one of the segments is an inch long. So that is a half inch, that is a three quarters of an inch, that is a full inch, has the a digital an image of the the number one. It reminds you that it's a pink it's a size one. So all size all numbers are size one, because you want to fill up the entire writing area. So kids with cerebral palsy find this much easier to use because they can push their hand on the top as they are trying to write. It doesn't can't show you too well while I'm trying to write because the screen is not working. But kids with hand disabilities and difficulty with fine motor control find this easier because if they find because it's a little heavier, a little thicker and little bulkier than a ruler, so when they go to push down on it, it doesn't move, unlike a ruler, which kind of slips all over the place for them. So that is my review of two of the the main products for the real ot solution, size matters, handwriting program. You can find Bev at real ot solutions.com
so you can find Bev. At real ot solutions.com Look for her products. She has more than just the two that I shared with you today. There's a bunch of products to support writing skills, preschool products and some preliminary writing a lot of visual, spatial based worksheets that she has for the students before you go or I go before we go. This week, I'd like to share with you something that's coming up every month. I am offering a free webinar. This month is passed, so you won't be able to come to this month. However, next month, it'll be in February. So if you go to Eventbrite and you find my name, Cheri Dotterer, on Eventbrite, you'll see three interventions to help make math stick. So if you're an OT, if you're a teacher, or even if you are a parent, there are mathematical concepts that we share in that webinar, that and we also share how to adapt them to make it work for any student. So come and join me, live, get to talk to me, and we'll hope to see you there at the three interventions to help make that stick for now. Have a beautiful day. A great week. Go be awesome. Go be brilliant. And remember you were put here for such a time as this.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai