Episode 105: Why I Created My Own Adapted Handwriting Paper

Jayson Davies
Jul 17, 2022
20 min read

Updated: Nov 14, 2024

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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 105 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.

As an OT practitioner in the schools, it doesn’t take long to realize that most of the evaluation referrals coming your way are due to handwriting concerns. As such, you have probably begun to fine-tune your ability to promote increased fine motor, visual motor, and manual dexterity skills.

But another way to address handwriting is through adapting the environment and using tools to support students’ ability to learn handwriting in a new way.

In this episode of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast, I want to introduce you to an adapted paper I developed over 5 years and still recommend to parents and teachers today. I also want to give it to you for free so that you can use and share it as well.

Have a listen to learn the following objectives:

Learn about common types of adapted paper used by School-Based OTPs
Learn why and how I decided to create Gray-Space Paper
Learn how to use Gray-Space Paper to support students with handwriting difficulties

Resources

Episode Transcript

Expand to view the full episode transcript.

Amazing Narrator

Hello and welcome to the OT school house podcast, your source for school based occupational therapy tips, interviews and professional development. Now to get the conversation started, here is your host. Jayson Davies, class is officially in session.

Jayson Davies

Hello, ot practitioners. What is happening? I hope you are having a great day. We're doing things I don't know, not different today, but it is just going to be a solo episode. It's only going to be me, which I don't know I enjoy. Sometimes I know you all enjoy. Sometimes, just hearing from me, I'm actually recovering from COVID. Long story, I went on a vacation with my wife, my my child, Kyler, and my in laws, and we went up to Mammoth here in California, up north, and came back with COVID. Unfortunately, Kyler was the first one to get it, and it was kind of inevitable that myself and my wife would also get it. And so that's what happened. So you might hear a little clearing of my throat throughout this episode, I will be mindful to edit out coughs. No one wants to hear coughs on a podcast, but you might hear an occasional clearing of the throat. Everyone is doing well now. We are all recovering. We're no longer we no longer have a fever, we no longer have the chills, the eggs, or anything like that, but we all kind of have an occasional cough that that still comes out once and a while. So this episode, I just wanted to dive in to just me and you here today. You know we're not going to have a special guest. And actually, this is an episode that I meant to record over 100 episodes ago, and I'm finally doing it today. It is something that is near and dear to my heart. It's something that I created, and I wanted to share that with you. And what that is, is the gray space paper that we have that you can get 100% for free@otschoolhouse.com when you subscribe to our email list, this is a document of nine different pages of paper that you get completely for free. And I developed this. I actually sold it a little bit on Teachers Pay Teachers for a while, like $1 each, but I was like, at the end of the day, I just wanted to give it out so that people could use it, so that OTs could share it with teachers, share it with the kids that they work with, and any other professional within the schools that might use it. So I'm going to share a little bit about the history to the development and also why I prefer to use this paper as opposed to some other adapted papers out there. So that's what we're going to talk about today. I'm excited to talk about this with you, even though that it's a little difficult to talk every now and then with COVID Right now, I'm excited to share this with you today. So let's go ahead and dive into it. This is episode 105 of the OT school house podcast, and we're talking about gray space paper, which is a nine page, nine PDF paper that you can get for free at the OT school house. So let's get into it. All right, so before I get into the how I developed it, and kind of the purpose behind it, I do just want to talk a little bit about the history as to why this is important and why I ended up developing it. I don't think it's any sort of surprise that handwriting concerns is the number one reason for referral for occupational therapy from teachers, administrators, anyone who is making that referral, even parents themselves. I don't have the research off the top of my head, but there have been a few different surveys to occupational therapy practitioners that have shown that their number one reason for referral, or to them, is indeed handwriting. If you have worked in the schools for more than a month, you have also seen this. I'm sure where your referrals that are coming to you for an occupational therapy assessment is because of handwriting. So that kind of begs the question, well, what type of interventions can we use for handwriting? Right? We get a handwriting assessment, or we get a handwriting referral. I should say we complete an assessment. And sure enough, yes, we do see handwriting as a concern that is preventing the student from accessing their educational curriculum. And there's a few different things that we can do right? We can sit down and use a program, handwriting program itself, and work with the student, 101, we could potentially do that in a small group. We can recommend that the teacher use a handwriting program in the classroom. We can provide adaptive paper, kind of like what we're going to talk about today. We can recommend that a student use a different type of word processing, maybe they use speech to text or even word processing using a keyboarding man, back in the day, we used to have those keyboards that like just had a little screen. I can't even think of the name on the other right now, but iPads have basically replaced those types of tools, right? A lot of kids are using an iPad or a different type of tablet. But there are many different ways that we can go about supporting a student that has difficulty with handwriting. And as I mentioned, adapted paper is one of those ways. Now, when I was working with a lot of kids with handwriting difficulties, I had several go to adaptive papers. You know. When I first started in the schools. In fact, I'll share with you a few of my favorite different adaptive papers to use. One was the abilitation high right paper for sizing. That's at least what it promoted for the most part was sizing of letters. If you've never seen this paper before, if you have a three line paper, the bottom part of the paper between lines one and two was highlighted yellow and the top was white. So this would support students in identifying the difference between what I call and many of us call small and tall letters. Right. Tall letters had to start at the top line. Small letters start at the midline and only go into the small bottom area, so high right paper from habilitations, they do sell that in bulk, and you can buy it. I don't know the cost of it. It's probably somewhere in the 15 to $20 a ream, if you want to call it that, or for like, 100 pages, or something like that. And it does have that bright yellow area underneath the midline going down to the baseline. Now, the pro about this is that it is very bright. It is a great visual cue. But what the Pro is is also a con, because it is very bright. It's very yellow. It stands out very much from paper that maybe a student's peer is using, they're using maybe just standard three line paper, and then next to them, the peer who's using the high right paper is this bright yellow paper. So it's good. It provides that visual cue, but at the same time, it's an all or nothing. It's either you have the high right or you don't have the high right. And so I kind of see that as a con. Another paper that I actually really appreciated, using it, and I did get a little bit of inspiration from it is the do to learn, stop go paper. Now this paper doesn't have the visual cue of being highlighted, but it does have a visual cue of little tick marks where each letter could go. Think of it kind of like graph paper, except it doesn't have a top line or a bottom line, per se of the boxes, it just has the little tick marks, and so one letter can go in between two tick marks. Now I really like that, because it focuses on spacing. And as I mentioned, I did kind of get some inspiration from that when I developed the gray space paper. And we'll talk about that in a little bit, because we always have those kids that they squish all their words together, and they need a little bit of that defined space, a little bit of definition for them to understand where a space goes in between words you might have heard using spaghetti and meatball, the spaghetti and meatball theory when it comes to teaching kids how to space out the words, right? So in a single word, you put a spaghetti space in between the letters, or just a very, very fine line space in between the word or the letters, and then in between words, you use a meatball space, which is a larger space so the stop go paper makes that a little bit more defined by actually giving them a little visual cue of tick marks for where to stop and start their letters. I guess you could call it now, again, the pro for this is that spacing aspect, but the con is that it's very limited in size. And again, it's either an all or nothing type of situation, either you have the tick marks or you don't have the tick marks. And so that was something that was nice about it. But at the same time, when you're trying to generalize and moving away from using that paper helping a student move back toward the typical third grade classroom paper that's being used, it's either all or nothing. You don't have that reduction in the visual cue. Now there's a paper that is common out there, and I'm not a big fan of it. And I just want to kind of say why I'm not a big fan of it. Now, the program itself is great. It has helped millions of kids, but I am not a fan of the Handwriting Without Tears paper. I think that it is difficult for kids to generalize from the two line paper that they used over to two or three line paper that is very common when you're not using the Handwriting Without Tears program paper, maybe if you started with the handwriting without tears, paper, when a student is in kindergarten or first grade just learning to write, maybe it could make sense, because they do actually have the paper kind of grow with the kids. The lines do get closer together as they move through the advanced level of books. But if you are a student that has learned traditionally on three line paper, and then you go over to the Handwriting Without Tears paper, I think it's confusing. And I've seen a lot of kids get confused by it myself, and so I have strayed away from that. So those are the three different papers that I know are very common within school based OT. And so I just wanted to talk about some of those pros and some of those cons. Of course, traditional three and two line paper. Those are, you know, used the most you have those composition books and different so. Style notebooks, college rule and wide rule paper. Those are all great. And of course, they are the least restrictive paper, if you want to kind of use that Least Restrictive term. But sometimes kids do need a little bit more. And so when I was, you know, working in school based occupational therapy several years ago, and I was using the rehabilitation paper, and I was using the do to learn paper, and occasionally using the handwriting, the handwriting without tears, paper. I can't say that right today, I ultimately decided that there are a few factors that I didn't like enough about them, and I figured, you know what, I want to create something that will work for me and the students that I serve, and so that is what led me to go ahead and create the gray space paper that I now give away for free at ot schoolhouse.com you can get that by going to OT schoolhouse.com/subscribe you can get that right now. There's probably a link in the show notes that you can use as well. And now, the reason that I wanted to do this is because those other papers that I mentioned, I mentioned a few of the cons. The pros being the visual supports that they provide, but the con is also the visual supports that they provide, because in the high right paper, it's very bright. It's very yellow, even with the stop go paper, there's tick marks. But you can't, you can't make the tick marks go away. They're either there or they're not there. And so I didn't like how it was an all or nothing type of thing. And also, they were very expensive to actually get these papers, especially the high right? You know, you can't copy a yellow bright paper, a for legality reasons and B, because most of our printers in the schools are black and white printers, and so if you printed it out, either you'd have a dark, black line or maybe a very light line. Not saying that I ever did that, because copyright stuff, but that's part of the reason that I made my own paper, because then I could copy it off as much as I want. I could provide it to teachers and give it to them. And secondly, what I kind of already referenced too, is I didn't like that. It was an all or nothing. There wasn't the ability for our students to grow with this paper or intently, I guess, for the paper to grow with our students. Yeah, the lines got a little bit smaller, closer together, but that visual cue was all or nothing. So what did I do? Well, I opened up a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, and I got to work, I started to develop. Well, to be honest, at this point, I had no idea how to use Excel, but I started to develop my skills with Excel, and started to realize how you could change the width and the size of each individual line and column and row and all that good stuff, things that are so simple to me now I had no idea what I was doing. So I thought that Excel would work because of the different rows, and it actually ended up working very well. And so what I did was that I created rows and I offset the colors to add one every other row was a very, very light gray, and that was going to be the area between the baseline and the midline, kind of like the ability has the the bright yellow space. Well, I kind of used that, except I used gray space, or gray, the color gray. And so I added a midline, I added a top line, a baseline, I added a space of white in between, in between the first line and the second line. You know, because I was making paper for very younger kids. And so I was using a landscape model as opposed to a portrait. And so I wanted to, you know, provide some space in between the individual lines themselves. Then what I also did was, on each individual box, I added, or at least for the bottom area of the lines. You can see all this at on the website, to check out our gray space what it looks like. But to describe it is, I added little tick marks only on the boxes that developed the bottom part of each line. So between the baseline and the midline, I created little tick marks, kind of like what the stop, go paper from do to learn has. So I kind of incorporated ideas from both the high right paper, except I didn't use yellow. I use gray. And then also the tick mark paper, or the tick marks from the other paper, because I did like that aspect of being able to help a student space. I would oftentimes let them put a sticker where there should be a space, or something like that. So I incorporated these together. I started off with this paper being very large. It was for, or when I first started to develop, at least, I was developing it for like, a kindergarten age student or maybe a first grader that's writing very large. Again, I wanted to make it copyable printable, so it's all gray. There's no color to it, and it's just very standard. Now, what was nice about creating this was that it was. My own. I could share it as much as I want. I could email it off to a teacher so that they could print as much as they wanted. I could email it home to a parent so that they could use it. And so now there was no worrying about cost of having to buy or share purchase materials. This is something that was created by myself, and so I could share it as much as I want. Now, what was also nice about this is because once the students that I started using this paper with started to make progress, and I was seeing that they were ready to kind of move on to the next level of paper, I guess you could call it. Well, then I went in and I copied that paper that I had made before, and I made some adjustments to it. I didn't just make the line smaller and turn it to portrait mode, but I was able to actually make those tick marks a little bit less prominent, so they were still there. They were still visual cue. But you really had to look for them if you needed them. Likewise, the gray paper that or the gray line that you could that was on that baseline area to kind of help with the sizing of letters, I brought that back as well. I made it more transparent and less gray, and so the paper looked more like your traditional style paper with just lines. And I had the lines on the sides, you know, the indentation lines, but that gray and this tick marks were slowly disappearing. And then as the kids got more advanced, they needed smaller paper. And again, I did the same thing. I actually reduced the tick mark visibility. I removed, or completely removed, I think at this point the gray, because their sizing was getting so good, and so now their paper was growing with them. As they improved their writing, their paper had less and less visual marks that they no longer needed, as opposed to just making the paper smaller and keeping all the visual marks that they didn't really need. I was taking away those visual stimuli that was actually facilitating their growth. So that was kind of how I went down this process of developing the grace based paper, and I ended up eventually having nine different pages. The reason for that is because kids needed different things. Some kids at kindergarten, if they got what they needed by time they got to the first second grade, they no longer needed those tick marks in the gray line to help size their their words. But other students, maybe I didn't start working with them until second grade, and they needed smaller paper, but they still needed the tick marks and the gray line. And so I had that available for those students who needed it. But again, I wanted them to be able to eventually grow and graduate from one paper to the next, where the tick marks gradually faded away, and so did the gray line that helped them with the sizing of the letters. I wanted that to fade away as well. And so now I do have nine pages, and it goes from the entire span of the gamut, I guess you could call it from, you know, being landscape a few lines on a page for those kindergarten kids, all the way up to working with students that are maybe in fourth, fifth or above, where those lines are nice and small and they're close together, and the gray is just so faint that it just is that little bit of prompt that they need, but just enough to give them the prompt, but not enough to be like, Wait, what is this paper I'm using? This is like, so weird. So it's just the right amount of prompt that they need, and it can be adjusted, even for whatever reason. Say you download the copy of gray space paper. This is a little trick, and you find that the gray isn't dark enough, or maybe it's too dark. What is a little trick that you can use is if you're making photocopies, or even if you're just printing this off from your printer or your computer to your printer, you can adjust the darkness of your printer settings and make those lines a little bit lighter or darker. And so that's what's really great about this, because there's no colors. You don't have to worry about printing it on a color printer. You can just print it out on a black and white printer, and by adjusting the color darkness, or the grayscale darkness, whatever it's called, in your printer settings, you can actually adjust the paper again, individually for that student. And what's really nice is that you can even tell the teacher, hey, the next time you run off this paper, just jot down this little note, print it at 75% darkness, or print it at 50% darkness. And now they know that when they print it off, it'll be the same way that it looked like when you printed it off for their student. All right, so I know a lot of what I'm saying would make a lot more sense if you could actually see the paper. This might actually work really well as a YouTube video as opposed to a podcast, but I wanted to get this out there for you, and really quickly, I want to walk through the different sizes of. Paper and kind of what they look like. But again, be sure to head on over to OT schoolhouse.com/subscribe to get your paper as well, so that you have that ready to print off for the 2023, school year, or whatever school year you are heading into or are in right now. So as I mentioned, there are nine different iterations of the paper. And I'm going to start from the very top. The first paper that I made is, or the first few, I should say, are actually designed with a kindergarten sizing in mind. And so we have one inch paper with a 20, or, sorry, 25% or one quarter inch space after each line. So think of like your typical three line paper for kindergarten, how it's on the landscape page and it has spacing in between the lines for those tail letters that go down. And so we have that. It has the gray and it has the tick marks moving up from there. Also, kindergarten paper is a three quarter inch line with, again, a quarter inch of space in between the the individual lines. So that, again, we're moving slightly toward smaller lines, but we still have nice big lines for kindergarteners. It has the gray and it has the spacing, and then we get to where we take away that space in between the lines for kindergarten, slash first graders still on landscape, three quarter inch line, but no space in between the lines. Still has the gray, still has the spacing, but we are making the lines a little bit smaller for the students at this area, or at this time when a student is learning to use this paper, sizing and spacing is a huge component that they need to learn, and that is why all the visual aspects are there for all the kindergarten paper from one inch to three quarter inch, we have all the spacing. We have all the gray sizing visual cues to help them out. As we get to first and second grade paper, still on landscape, more toward the first grade paper, we have wide spacing on half inch line. Now there's no longer spacing again in between the lines, so it's a lot more space for a child to write on, but it still does have all the spacing visual cues. Now, after we have those first four pages, we're going to do two things now with the next step up in the paper. First, we're going to turn it from being landscape mode. We're going to turn it on its side to make it portrait, so now you have shorter lines, but more lines on a given page. The other thing that we are now doing is, because kids are getting a little more proficient with their writing, is we're narrowing those tick marks to make the space that they have for each individual letter a little bit smaller. All right, then we have a imitation of that paper. It's the same exact half inch line has those narrow spaces, but we're taking away the gray, so now they no longer potentially need the gray to help with sizing. And then after that, we also have a one half inch paper that has no gray or no spaces, so this looks more like your typical three line paper on a portrait sheet of paper, it's just, you know, you got your top line, your midline and your baseline all the way down the page. And that brings us to our final sizing change, the final two pieces of paper, the final two, I guess you could call it stages with the gray space paper. The final sizing of the lines is two fifths of an inch from the top line to the baseline. And there's two versions of this. Neither of these final two pages have the spacing tick marks, but they both still have the gray bottom part of the line and the white top part. One of them includes a dashed midline in between the white and the gray, and the other does not include that white dash mark in between the white and the gray. So again, we are simply removing some of the visual cues that help with the writing to help lead the child back to using the least restrictive paper, if you want to call it that, which is eventually the paper that they use in the classroom that they are a part of. You know, we do want the student to eventually get to using paper that looks the same as their peers next to them, but we want to do that in a way that actually supports them and not just throws them in the deep end using paper that is not conducive to their writing style. So we want to help get them there, but we want to do it in a way that is a going to help build them up and be also going to slowly. Reduce the amount of supports that they need. So that is the grace based paper. I kind of outlined the nine different pages that you get for free when you subscribe at ot schoolhouse.com/subscribe, and you can get it all there. I know this is visual when we're talking about paper, we're talking a lot about visual aspects. I mentioned the term visual cues that this paper provides over and over and over again, and maybe I should actually produce a YouTube video that has all the visuals for you, but be sure to head on over to the show notes at ot schoolhouse.com/episode 105, or just go straight to OT schoolhouse.com/subscribe and you can get this paper 100% free to use for your convenience, to use with your students, to pass along to teachers, so that they can use as well. So that is going to wrap up Episode 105 of the OT school house podcast. I hope everything I said, even though, without the visuals, made sense, and I do hope that you head on over and grab the paper for your use. I know that it will help your student. I've had so many teachers. I've had therapists come back to me, even parents have come back to me. Sent me an email, and they have just shared words of appreciation because this paper has supported their student, and that's all I can ask for I'm so happy that that is the case. I love getting those emails. And who knows, maybe one day you'll use this paper and you will feel the same, the same movement to send me an email and say, Hey, Jayson, Thanks for Thanks for creating this or maybe you'll use this paper and you'll think that it's even something that could be better, and you'll go ahead and create your own paper. You know, things can always be improved, and I have made adaptations to this paper several times over the years to get it to the point that it is now. And actually, I still have a few ideas that I want to do to make this paper even better. And who knows, maybe that'll come in the near future. Well, this episode, we are just about through that 30 minute mark. I wanted to keep this short. I wanted to preserve my COVID voice you can probably hear it's getting a little raspy, but thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate you. I appreciate you taking the time to learn more so you can support your students as a school based occupational therapy practitioner, thank you again, and I will see you in episode 106 of the OT school house podcast. Until then, take care and have a great rest of your day. Peace out. Bye.

Amazing Narrator

Thank you for listening to the OT school house podcast for more ways to help you and your students succeed right now, head on over to otschoolhouse.com. Until next time class is dismissed.

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