Watch How You Hold That Crayon

This article talks about a rising trend in early education to have occupational therapists improve students' fine motor abilities (particularly in regard to writing skills).  The article provides a variety of testimonials from parents about their motivations for hiring a therapist (preschool admissions criteria; difficulties experienced during progress in elementary school) and suggests a variety of possible reasons that students may be increasingly displaying fine motor deficits (penmanship no longer directly taught in school; overemphasis on academic preparation in tasks that do not engage fine motor skills).  Interestingly, this article appeared in the 'Fashion & Style' section of the New York Times, not the 'Education' section, and the article seems to focus on a very financially privileged segment of the student population, but it's difficult to tell whether this is because these fine motor deficits are unique to these privileged students or whether they are only the population with the means to pay for such specialized remediation.

I've held on to this article (it's nearly a year old) because as I read it, it occurred to me that while students have to wait to acquire the knowledge base for writing letters and numbers before they can begin to practice their fine motor skills on this writing activities, they do not have to wait to have these knowledge sets to practice fine motor skills in an art context.  I think it would be interesting to create a research project that measured the effects of exposure to art materials/activities in early childhood on later writing abilities.  This could be done by implementing an early childhood curriculum that specifically increases exposure to art materials/activities and then comparing their later written work against a group of students who did not have access to the experimental curriculum.