This is the first of a series of posts I plan to write on the subject of teaching left handed children. In this initial post I will first give you some background about myself and my family in regards to our left handed experience and a little about what I have learned about the importance of what I will refer to as aligned dominance.
To begin, I will give you my background. I am a left handed female approaching my mid-thirties. I have always used my left hand for writing, eating, brushing my teeth and various other tasks. However, I have historically played any and all sports I can think of with my right hand or in a right handed manner. Some examples would be throwing a ball and batting right handed in baseball. I played basket ball in junior high school right handed, both dribbling and shooting. I played tennis right handed, but I'm terrible in tennis so I gave that up. I twirled flags in high school band right handed and kicked balls in soccer or kickball with my right foot. I listen to people on the phone with my left ear.
I do not ever remember anyone pushing me to be a right handed person, but my mother mentioned to me in a conversation this morning that my grandfather used to try to make me use my right hand when playing sports as a child. He told me to throw a ball with my right hand. I remember countless summer days playing catch with my grandfather in his front yard under his big Ash tree. I never remember pressure to use my right hand, but I remember him encouraging me to "cut off the T.V. and play catch."
I have never understood why I would do some things with my left hand and then others with my right hand. I'm not sure my grandfather's prompting me to throw right handed is the whole explanation for my mixed dominance. I played all other sports right handed such as basket ball and kick ball and he never taught me those. I learned all other sports in school. My coaches over the years never pressured me to use my right hand over my left. They did their best to show me what I should do left handed, but they were right handed and I just seemed to find it easier to copy them. My right side just seemed more natural for sports. When I was in college I spent a summer studying abroad in Beijing, China. I remember going to the gym and being taught by some of the Chinese students to play badminton. I started to play right handed, but the students noticed that this is not the hand I wrote with. they asked me why I wasn't using my left hand. I told them that I always use my right hand for sports and just did so because I always do. They encouraged me to try with my left hand and see if I was better off using it. I was about as bad with badminton starting off as I'd been in tennis. So I gave it a go and I played badminton better with my left hand. Hmmm.
I have several children, one of whom has some learning difficulties. I will call this child Cube Boy, since he is a Rubik's Cube fanatic. Cube Boy has a hard time with reading and remembering things in general. He is 9 years old and my husband and I became concerned about the progress of his schooling. We are taking him to Kay Ness with Southeastern Neurodevelopmental Consultants. You can find her website here. Kay checked Cube Boy for reflex integration, dominance also called lateralization, and many other things. In the process of her evaluation of him, she talked a lot about the importance of dominance being fully aligned in each person. The lack of aligned dominance can contribute to and even cause learning struggles for people whose dominance is mixed. In other words, someone who is left handed should be left eyed, left footed and left eared as well. Left handed people, more than right handed people tend to have mixed dominance, like me. They may write with their left hands but kick a ball with their right foot or look through a kaleidoscope with their right eye. Making sure than a child's dominance is aligned is very important for every child, but for the left handed child, it is even more important as we lefty's tend to be a little mixed up in the area of our dominance.
So, if you have a left handed child, you may wonder what all of this has to do with educating him. It has a lot to do with educating left handed children, particularly if the teacher is right handed. A child should never be pressed, encouraged, or coaxed to use their right hand for the convenience of the teacher or due to the lack of left handed equipment (like a baseball glove or scissors). You should never try to push a child to choose one side over the other. The child is genetically predetermined to use either the left or the right and no amount of outside opinion will change this. However, encouraging or trying to force a child to "switch" can cause serious problems with learning, speech (stuttering), and psychological disorders.
So if your child is left handed, the first step to educating him or her well, is to make sure he has the proper equipment. Right handed tools and equipment are most comfortably used with the right hand. If you make it easy for your child to use his left hand, he won't be frustrated by the lack of a left handed baseball glove, for example, and throw right handed so he can be part of the fun when other kids are playing catch or baseball. Little things like left handed scissors, pencils and even spiral notebooks for left handed people make it easier for a child to use his left hand and be comfortable in the process.
There are also free printable worksheets for left handed children available online to make teaching handwriting easier. Some can be found for print manuscript here and for cursive writing here. The letters are on the right side of the page which is the natural place your left handed child's eyes want to go. Right to left is the more natural direction a left hander's eyes want to move on a piece of paper.
I grew up hating spiral notebooks because my hand always presses down on the wire and it is uncomfortable. The same is true of binders. Allowing a child to flip them around and use them the opposite way will eliminate this annoyance. You can find left handed notebooks online, but I am a cheap skate at heart and realized that you can cover both sides of a right handed spiral notebook with cute paper and simply flip the spiral over and use it backwards. By doing this, you have your very own left handed spiral notebook! The same thing can be done with the sewn composition notebooks and with three-ring binders (as long as they aren't the d-ring type). You child will love this, and it can be especially fun if he gets to pick out his own fun paper from a craft store like Hobby Lobby or Jo-Ann's.
A random suggestion I saw on another blog was to staple a left handed child's papers on the top right corner rather than the top left so he can flip papers in a packet with his non-writing hand. If you use the lefty ideas for spirals and binders, this will become a must.
If you are interested in learning more about dominance, Kay Ness has a recorded speech on her website that you can listen to for free. It is approximately 70 minutes long so do this when you have a block of free time. She also has free stuff here. I highly recommend using the N.O. Workout for your homeschool P.E. course. This workout is designed to organize the lower levels of a person's brain so the higher levels can work efficiently.
I will address the topic of dominance and how to help make sure your child is keeping his lateralization aligned to promote optimum and efficient neurological organization and function in future posts.
Leave your ideas in the comments section and share them with fellow lefty's and their parents.
