You may look at Anaya Ellick and see a child who’ll have a lifetime of challenges. But i see her as a girl who’s providing a lifetime of inspiration. Like many children her age, 7yr old Anaya Ellick loves reading, drawing, and writing. She spends hours drawing and working on her handwriting. All that practice paid off when she won a national penmanship award, a remarkable honor for a first grader just getting the hang of writing. What’s more remarkable than a little girl born without hands wining a handwriting contest?

In order to write, Anaya holds a pencil between her arms and stands at her desk to get the right angle for writing. Yet her handwriting is genuinely the neatest handwriting in her whole class.

This is what her winning writing looked like:


Anaya competed against 50 other children to win the Nicholas Maxim Special Award for Excellence in Penmanship. The teachers at her school weren’t surprised that Anaya won the award, but the girl experienced a little shock. When mom, Bianca Middleton, told her that she won the prize, Anaya kept saying “For real? Are you serious?”…The soon led to excitement.

While Middleton, her mother felt overjoyed that her daughter’s handwriting won recognition, she wasn’t truly surprised. Because since Anaya was born, she was a fighter. She has always been so positive and confident and has never been down on herself. Middleton also recalled how she swaddled her infant daughter, she struggled to get out and move. As Anaya grew, she realized she was different than other kids, but she set her mind on doing exactly what other children did. When prosthetists tried to give her a modified fork with a strap to hold it on her arm, the girl refused to use it, insisting on using a fork like everyone else. Anaya simply grasps it between her forearms to eat.

Middleton admited to the fact as a mother she sometimes struggles to watch Anaya attempt a new task; Middleton wants to help so much. But she knows that her daughter wants to do everything on her own. She taught herself to tie her shoes. She insists on dressing herself. At the playground, she climbs up ropes, scurries across the monkey bars, and swings as high as she can. Once in a while Middleton has to reminds her daughter Anaya it’s good to ask for help. But as much as she tries guiding her daughter, Middleton finds that she’s the one who learns.

“Anaya has been my teacher from the very beginning,” she says. “I look at her like ‘Wow, God blessed me with this little girl. I am honored.'”


For winning the contest, Anaya gets $1,000 and a trophy, according to Zaner-Bloser’s website. Her school won too, as the company awarded it a gift certificate to be spent on print and digital resources for students and teachers.

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