Abstract:

The ability to produce fluent and legible handwriting is an essential developmental skill for primary school children. The literature attests to the extent to which writing difficulties not necessarily attributable to a specific learning disorder or the possible certification of dysgraphia could have a negative impact on the perception of self-efficacy, relational dimensions and learning itself. The Guidelines for Specific Learning Disorders (MIUR, 2011) highlight how handwriting represents an exercise of fine motor skills and manual functionality, for which the effective assumption of the body scheme in pre-school is essential. However, the role of the body is not reduced to the mere executive function of the gesture, corporeity is functional in allowing the child to perceive all that perceptive and sensorimotor information that from the experience of the body in the environment aims to transfer onto the paper. The graphic line is inherent to an internal imaginative tracing traceable to a mental representation that will be even more functional the more well planned and implemented movement situations are experienced. Studies stemming from the identification of mirror neurons (Gallese & Lakoff, 2005), suggestions from the bio-educational matrix (Frauenfelder, 2001) and the Embodied Cognitive Science approach (Gomez Paloma, 2020), have long clarified the extent to which processes of perception/action and cognition are simultaneously activated in learning processes. Yet, the primary school educational context is still anchored in learning experiences that limit the body's expressive, explorative and active potential. Suffice it to think of the recent legislative measure that introduces the specialized motor education teacher only from class four of primary school. In this exploratory study, an investigation was carried out on a non-probabilistic sample of 200 primary school children aged 8 and 9, divided into control and experimental groups, which involved the implementation of a play-motor workshop declined according to the dictates of the Jeannot method (1976). Symbolic games were implemented in global and segmental form, verbalization and the evocation of mental and motor representations of specific images and proposed movements involving the forms and directions of cursive writing (Jeannot, 1975; Neri, 2005).The study involved the administration of the BHK scale (Di Brina & Rossini, 2021), for the assessment of writing quality and speed in the pre- and post- lab phase, for both groups. Confirming the hypothesis of the centrality of the body as a tool for promoting more effective writing skills, the investigation reported results of improvement in both writing quality and speed, particularly for the experimental group. In the light of this initial experimentation, it appears essential to understand how to integrate the body component into teaching practices with greater focus on the early years of primary school. There is a need to design and implement educational interventions of a trans-disciplinary nature that involve the child's body, promoting an overcoming of the fragmentation of disciplines, and enhancing the use of the body as a learning tool of an experiential nature (Schmidt et al., 2018).

Keywords:

Physical education, dysgraphia, primary school.