About the Clinic
The Handwriting Clinic™ provides classes and therapy in fine motor and pre-handwriting development to PREVENT problems and achieve Kindergarten readiness. The pre-school classes a use a multi-sensory format to develop hand strength, fine motor manipulation skills, stroke development and pre-handwriting skills for children who have ready to learn handwriting or have mild delays in fine motor skills. For children with a specific disability, or significant fine motor delay, we offer private therapy sessions. For Kindergarteners and up, we offer print classes using block print or an adapted D’Nealian style print that we call “Snail Tails”. The Kindergarten/First Grade class is 16 hours during the summer, and 12 sessions during the fall/spring. We offer a remedial print class that goes at a faster pace (8 sessions) with more opportunity for generalizing skills into writing, for first through 2nd graders. We have an older kids print legibility class for 2nd - 6th graders. A multi-sensory cursive class is offered using the First Strokes® Cursive Handwriting Program developed by Jan McCleskey, MA, OTR. A multi-sensory grasp class is offered and grouped into age level groups, in order to develop a better manipulative grasp. This class is for ALL students who need to develop a better grasp pattern on a pencil - important because by 4th grade when there is students are required to write extensively, poor grasp patterns may lead to fatigue, hand pain, or slower handwriting. Grasp Class may be taken concurrently with any class – and is for 1st through 5th graders. We incorporate grasp and fine motor skills during each session for the preschool and Kindergarten/1st grade classes. We also offer a numbers class for students who reverse numbers. The clinic also has writing literacy classes and keyboarding classes.
Children can attend classes without an assessment unless there is a specific disability or concern, where it would be important to do an assessment first to develop goals and objectives. We do screenings at the beginning of all classes so that the therapists can get to know your child. We also have the parents fill out a questionnaire, which helps us in programming. Classes are considered “educational tutoring” even though they are taught by therapists or degreed teachers. Parents cannot file with insurance companies for classes, as there are not individual goals and objectives developed for your child with individual programming.
Assistive technology assessment and training is available through the clinic.
Private therapy: The Handwriting Clinic™ is a registered occupational therapy facility with the State of Texas. The Handwriting Clinic™ provides therapy on an individual basis. Our specialty is fine motor skills. It is our philosophy that we can usually provide short term private therapy for fine motor skills development and handwriting development using therapeutic techniques. Many of our students have received therapy through other clinics for more general occupational therapy issues. We often provide referrals to other therapists and specialists. Often, a child may be receiving sensory integrative therapy through a sensory integration clinic. It may be important to continue that therapy. However, we would like to see your child sometime before Kindergarten for a 4 month period for some specific fine motor readiness skills. If your child is older and in need of therapy for handwriting or fine motor issues, we would like to see your child for a 2 month period as well. The charges for assessment and therapy are kept to a minimum, so that intervention is affordable. Payment is due at the time of the therapy, and we do not file or accept medical insurance (this keeps our cost down significantly and most insurance companies would not reimburse for handwriting issues anyway – but they do often reimburse for fine motor delays). We do assessments for ALL private therapy patients. If you plan on filing with your medical insurance, prior to your first visit, you will need a prescription from a physician that states “occupational therapy to evaluate and treat for fine motor delay”. The ICD diagnostic code of 314.5 – developmental coordination disorder, fine motor delay. Occasionally we evaluate students who do not have a fine motor delay, and we cannot code for billing insurance.
We are often asked if we can put in satellite clinics or provide traveling therapists, due to distance traveled for many children. We tried this one time, but opted for a fully functioning facility with a multisensory gym, several classrooms, and main office staff on site. Half our business is the clinic, the other is product sales and inservices to school districts nationally/internationally. We find that the only way to integrate all these services, is to have one location. This keeps the cost of our classes significantly down. We partner with several universities to provide a fieldwork site for occupational therapy students, and for research on our techniques and find it optimum to keep one location in order to provide this. Every summer, we have kids that come to our clinic – from all over Texas and Oklahoma, as well as several students who have come from other countries. Our clinic definitely goes beyond Plano – MOST parents are commuting in from Frisco, Dallas, Rockwall, East Texas, Ft. Worth, McKinney, and beyond! We are very thankful for all our wonderful families who continually put in their time and effort to allow us to provide the best services we feel we can provide, in one location.