4 Things to Improve Your Child’s Handwriting

Mommies, wondering what can you do to improve your child’s handwriting?

Most children have this problem of poor handwriting. If not, good handwriting, it is very important to have legible handwriting. Straining the eyes more to read what is written can be irritable.

Is it possible for everyone to have good handwriting? May be not, but readable and legible handwriting, yes, because handwriting is an acquired skill, and at its core, handwriting is a motor skill. Motor skills require a lot of practice to become proficient.

How To Start Reading for Toddlers

Basically, developing motor skills and regular practice can help a child improve his handwriting.

Here, we are going to discuss some tricks and techniques which can be applied to achieve bare minimum legible to beautiful handwriting.

Before we start, let us understand that the nursery schools might apply some technical methods how they group the letters for a child to start with for writing.

One famous method is Letter Formation Groups –

What are letter formation groups? Letter formation groups are formed based on similar formations. It will be easier for children to learn similar motor movements at a time starting with simple formations and progressing to difficult ones.

Children need to know the correct formations of every letter and should be taught the same right from the beginning. Although children have learnt the sounds phonetically it is easier for children to learn letters based on their formations.

In simple words, each group of letters is started in a similar way while writing, ending way may be different. Example – o,a,e.d etc;, these letters are formed starting in the same manner.

Supporting Children During Exams

Ok, let the teachers take care of these technicalities and let us move to ‘mommies and kids handwriting sessions at home’. Quite simple, just needs to be regular.

Fine Motor Skills

Easy guess, developing motor skills. Your toddler might start to write after 4 years of age. But we can prepare him physically first. Let him scribble, draw or color whatever and however he wishes to. It is just making the child getting used to the knack of holding a chalk or a pencil.

A thick color crayon is advised for ease of hold for 2-3 year toddler than a pencil or a chalk. Chalk pieces attract the children more for eating than anything intended otherwise.

Four ruled Notebooks

Use a four ruled notebook. Make sure the child properly touches both the borders to write the letters. A four ruled page can be divided into three zones –

Middle zone letters are those written between two lines in the middle, such as a. e, i, o, u, plus c, m, n, r, s, v, w and x.
Upper zone letters are that touch the top line, such as b,d,l,t,k,h.
Lower zone letters are those touch the bottom line such as g,j,p,q,y,z
The letter ‘f’ is trizonal, written over all the three zones.

When your child starts writing, make sure the strokes and the lines of the letters are within the borders or given writing space.

Spacing.

Despite having a proper practice of letters and their strokes, it doesn’t guarantee legibility as such. As the child grows older and starts writing sentences, the space between words matters a lot for good handwriting.

handwriting

Any guess on what our teachers asked us to do when young? We keep our left little finger after each word (for right handers) and continue writing the next. Literally. Might sound a slow method, but with time and practice, the child gets used to that spacing without using his little finger.

Might sound a bit odd to some parents, but a method if we practiced as a student in the early years and which worked like a wonder.

Notebook position

Some children tend to keep the notebook parallel (straight) to their sitting and write. This is again a wrong practice. Keep the notebook slightly angular (slanting) towards left side (for right handers). This gives a proper position to write clearly. Just as proper hold and grip of the pen/pencil is important, care must be taken to keep the notebook in proper position.

These are the basics. All these apply to both cursive and print writing practices. Regular practice of 10-15 minutes every day can improve the legibility of your child’s handwriting, plus the speed of his writing without spoiling the handwriting at large due to continuous writing as he moves to higher grades.

Rest giving time and space, making it a fun activity by bringing in a variety during the practice help the process faster and interesting.