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Top Ten Most Popular Baby Names of 2012: How easy will they be to handwrite? :)

According to BabyCenter.com, the most popular 2012 baby names are:

Male Names, starting at most popular:

Liam, Ethan, Noah, Mason, Jacob, Jack, Aiden, Logan, Jackson, Lucas

Female Names starting at most popular:

Emma, Olivia, Sophia, Ava, Isabella, Mia, Ella, Emily, Lily, Chloe

How does this relate to occupational therapy? Any occupational therapist who has ever had to teach handwriting and teach a young child how to write their name, knows how crucial teaching a name can be. It’s often the first thing the child starts writing, starting in preschool, and has to jot hastily down on every piece of paper for the rest of their lives. 

For ANY child, special needs or not, a short name (or an easy nickname) with primarily vertical lines and at best a few curves will be easiest. Diagonals are the trickiest and require more developmental maturity than vertical and horizontal lines. And some letters are more prone to reversals than others such as b, d, p, q. 

When I look at these top tens from a Handwriting Without Tears standpoint, none of them look too bad for a child with special needs to have to write. For Isabella, I’d vote for shortening it to “Bella” rather than “Izzy” because it is a really challenging one, two z’s and a y! Diagonal city!

If I had to name my child and knew in advance they would have significant special needs, I’d possibly try to find a 3 to four letter name that started with either a capital E, F, T, or L, and then had just a few simple lowercase letters, ideally avoiding b, d, or diagonals. (For example, Ella was a great one! Big line down, little lines across! Little line, little line! Magic c, little line! Even better would just be “Lila”.)

I often come across parents who lament that they would have named their child something differently had they known how much trouble the child would have handwriting! Realistically I’m sure if I truly had a perfect name picked out already then I would just go with the name I want and either give the child a nickname or just work a lot with my child on learning how to handwrite it! I’m not a HUGE fan of nicknames though, because they complicate things a little bit for a child with special needs, having two names to respond to and/or recognize and/or explain.

The most challenging name I ever had to teach (while working as a student occupational therapist in rural Mississippi at a pediatric clinic) was unique enough that I won’t share it, but I’ll give a fake name equivalent instead to explain – Ja-ni’queaL- the child’s name had an uppercase letter both at the beginning and end of the name, plus a dash, plus an apostrophe!

Hope you enjoyed my thoughts on the top most popular baby names of 2012 from a pediatric occupational therapist perspective!

 Image came from Handwriting Without Tears

The American Academy of Pediatrics says recess is really necessary. CONCUR!

Army OT guy, great article

The Grinch That Stole Blogmas….

We are officially on break…

…one of the many perks of being in the school system…not that I get paid diring it but nice to have a break.

I included a picture of an attempted glitter manicure…and a page of ginger bread accoutrements that one of my first graders was expected to cut out…yikes!!!

Also a picture of a recent sunrise I woke up to 🙂 and finally a picture from a recent late night of work at one of my schools…we ordered in some minestrone soup and one of the teachers lit a candle which made me laugh. 🙂

It was sweet how many presents I got addressed to miss awesomeness…Always makes me smile. Probably about 10 percent of my kids give me small gifts for the holidays which are of course appreciated but not expected or necessary. I think Starbucks gift cards are definitely the most common 🙂 I enjoy buying my friends drinks!

I am hoping that this next two weeks will allow me to catch up on some reviews!! I have tried out some new apps enough by the makers of dexteria to have pros and cons of each. And taught several kids how to tie their shoes using tying is a snap laces. 🙂

Well typing all of this on my phone is tough so I guess I’ll stop now. Thanks for the kind comments, emails, texts, Facebook messages, etc on my sweet black cat. I am hoping this next two weeks will be both productive and restful and healing!!

My kids..

I don't even know what to call this…

Awkward photos.
I know I’ve blogged about this before but it’s so weird I have to blog about it again because it keeps swimming in my brain, trying to figure out why.
The left is a picture of a pencil grip with a pipe cleaner threaded through it and a cocktail sword (which has been mostly broken off) on it too.

For whatever reason my kids are fascinated by it. And I have several kids who tend to fist their non-dominant hand while writing, and holding this object makes them happy. Don’t ask me why.

Cats are people too

Good news, bad news….

Bad news first…

Having a rough week!

My blog mojo and my general brain mojo have been lost this week. I’m feeling down, partially because I’m putting my 20 year old cat down this next Saturday, partially because I’m a little overwhelmed, partially because of the darkness of December, etc etc.