In this Thanksgiving-themed episode, Cheri Dotterer shares an engaging classroom activity that fosters body awareness, gratitude, and self-confidence. Discover how 'The Thank-Filled Me' can transform your short school week into a memorable and meaningful experience for your students
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RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE
Dysgraphia Checklist
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TIMESTAMPS
0:26 Overview of the activity and its goals (gratitude, body awareness, memory retention).
1:31 Instructions for creating life-sized body outlines.
2:57 Explaining the "I am grateful for..." writing exercise.
6:27 Adaptations for students with varying needs.
7:33 Wrap-up and reflections on implementing the activity.
8:12 Closing thoughts and Thanksgiving wishes.
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BOOKS
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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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QUESTION
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HASHTAGS
#thewritingglitch
#cheri #dysgraphia #dyslexia #SpecificLearningDisability #successdespitedisability #tier1interventions #DysgraphiaAwareness #UnderstandingDysgraphia #LearningDisabilities #SupportingNeurodiversity #InclusiveEducation #IMPACTLearning
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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.
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Join The Writing Glitch Community. https://thewritingglitch.com/
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Unknown Speaker 0:00
Hey everybody, and welcome to this episode of the writing glitch. It's gonna be a little different than what you're normally hearing from me today. I am I do not have an interview for you today. I do not have a product review for you. What I have is a treatment intervention for you for Thanksgiving. So as Thanksgiving week is coming up, next week, you're going to have a short week at school.
Unknown Speaker 0:26
I have some ideas on what you can do, or I've I have an i one idea of something that you can do with your students that will promote body awareness. It will improve memory retention. It will improve their gratefulness.
Unknown Speaker 0:47
It can be it will fit all of the characteristics of impact. Impact is inclusion, metacognition,
Unknown Speaker 0:55
perseverance, adaptability, confidence and transcendence. So as you can see on the screen, we have a picture of the think filled me. So what you're going to do is you're going to have the kids get out a piece of paper that will allow them to be life size, so that newsprint that you can get down in the storeroom, you rip off pages that are the length of a child. So you want it to be their life size. The only way they're going to understand how tall they are is if they see it
Unknown Speaker 1:31
written in real life. So you're going to have them pair up. One student is going to draw the outline of the other student. Now we need to be aware of
Unknown Speaker 1:47
sensitive areas of the body. We don't want to get them too close. So create some ground rules that they are not allowed to get too close to parts of the body that they're not supposed to get
Unknown Speaker 2:00
up near.
Unknown Speaker 2:02
I so first thing that you're going to do is you're going to have the students pair up, draw themselves, and I like to start at the feet, because it's the farthest away from the brain. And let me hit that next one where we're going to do so you got to be answering one question or one statement the entire time you're going from the the feet to the brain. And that is I am grateful for because and so that when you fill in after the word for it's going to be a body part. So I'm grateful for my toes because have the kids think about what it is that is unique or were usable about their toes.
Unknown Speaker 2:53
No answer is a wrong answer.
Unknown Speaker 2:57
You're going to have them write the answer. I am grateful for my toes, because then you're going to write the the answer in their toes. So this is a writing activity.
Unknown Speaker 3:10
It's inclusion, because you're you can include every student in the classroom that can get down on the floor, that we can write their paper, if you've got some extreme
Unknown Speaker 3:23
cases with students that are wheelchair bound or are non verbal, this might not be the appropriate activity for them, however, for the most part, for most mobile students, this activity is inclusive.
Unknown Speaker 3:40
It's medic. Fits the idea of metacognition, because you're making them think, what are they grateful for? Their toes for?
Unknown Speaker 3:49
It's perseverance, because to get from the feet to the brain and answer all the body parts in between, it's going to take a little bit of perseverance. You may have kids that are going to be very frustrated and cannot even answer the first question, I am grateful because they're going to need some coaching. They're going to need some guidance to come up with ideas that they might be grateful for their toes. So some pre training about gratefulness, about body parts, awareness about different activities might be something that you have to do to lead up to this activity.
Unknown Speaker 4:30
As far as depth ability goes, I'm going to show you something that we can do here just a little bit. It's also going to build confidence in themselves. Self confidence is one of the reasons why kids with disabilities have such a difficult time, because they don't have any self confidence. So this is going to be a self awareness, self confidence building activity for them,
Unknown Speaker 4:55
and it will transcend time, because you're going to be able to.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
To take this activity. Encourage them to take it home and share with their parents. So when we get up to a little bit above the feet, I'm grateful for my calves, my knees, my thighs,
Unknown Speaker 5:17
then the middle part of their body, their torso. I'm grateful for my hips. You can include the pelvis if you want, depending on what age these kids are, my stomach, my lungs, my heart. And if you want to add things like spleen and other organs that are in the torso, by all means, go ahead,
Unknown Speaker 5:40
but let the child guide you. They may want to say, I'm grateful for my ribs, because they keep my body upright and they protect my my heart and lungs. Let them do it. Don't be rigid. This is a very open activity to get them to think about themselves.
Unknown Speaker 6:03
Then you can move to the arms, do the fingers, the wrist, the forearm, the upper arm,
Unknown Speaker 6:11
and then the head, your shoulders, neck, all the facial features, their hair, your brain, your skull. You can do as many body parts as you want. Now that exit that idea for adaptability,
Unknown Speaker 6:27
you can take and put their writing paper. If you have some of their writing paper, you can cut it up into small pieces that are going to fit into the size of their body parts you can figure out how long their sentence is going to be. Now, another thing that that you can do is you can write out the sentence and have them copy it so that they're not
Unknown Speaker 6:54
they're not feeling like they have to write the whole thing by themselves. If you've got a student who can answer with like one word, and you are putting, maybe I am grateful, somewhere in the middle of their body, and they are filling in with one word, let them do that. If you've got a kid who needs a scribe for just about everything, let the scribe do that, have the kids answer the question, What am I grateful for?
Unknown Speaker 7:27
And then they will have
Unknown Speaker 7:29
the thank filled me.
Unknown Speaker 7:33
Hopefully this idea strikes you as something that you'd like to do in your ot session. You as a teacher, maybe a collaborative session between the OT speech and teacher. Hopefully this activity sparks a thought that will give you some guidance. How did I come up with that? I just used an outline of the human body in Canva,
Unknown Speaker 8:00
but your goal is to have them trace their own body so they can see the real body size.
Unknown Speaker 8:10
For now,
Unknown Speaker 8:12
I want to wish you a very happy Thanksgiving. I will not be releasing an episode on Thanksgiving proper.
Unknown Speaker 8:21
That's a day for you to
Unknown Speaker 8:25
be thankful and be with your family.
Unknown Speaker 8:29
I will see you in December,
Unknown Speaker 8:32
and don't forget you were put here for such a time as this. Go be awesome. Go be brilliant. This has been Cheri Dotterer, your classroom Coach, thanks for being here at the writing glitch. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai