Importance of Handwriting
Practice Makes Permanent - Not Perfect!
Children should be taught about handwriting as it is developmentally appropriate. Learning letter formation can increase students' ability to spell words and assist in students' learning to read. With all the benefits of learning handwriting, shouldn’t it still be a valuable aspect of the curriculum? We think so!
How can Really Great Handwriting Benefit Your Students?
Really Great Reading offers a program called Really Great Handwriting that is integrated with our kindergarten curriculum, Countdown, our first-grade curriculum, Blast, and our second and third grade program, HD word. The addition of Really Great Handwriting benefits teachers and learners because the two programs work together to align letter formation with phonic concepts.
Utilizing Countdown, Blast, or HD Word with Really Great Handwriting builds upon the ideas that students are learning. They appeal to learners by combining visual, auditory, and kinesthetic lessons to teach students about the strokes and movements used to form letters. Our space themed lessons increase student interest as children are learning the foundation of writing.
Learn more about how Really Great Handwriting will benefit your students!
How do we know if a student is ready to write?
There are readiness skills that must be developed before children are taught to write. These skills are:
- Developing sensorimotor system: these are the systems in the body that involve sensory inputs, like touch or vision, and motor responses, like movement.
- Development of large and small muscles: referencing the growth and coordination of different muscle groups.
- Gross motor skills: physical abilities that use the body’s large muscles, like walking or bending over.
- Fine motor skills: pieces of movement involving small muscle groups, like in the hands or fingers.
- Visual perception: interpreting and making sense of visual information.
- In-hand manipulation skills
Children should also experience pre-writing skills, called mark making, before learning to trace letters. This might begin as early as 12 months old and continue until ages 2-3 when children start to draw shapes and lines. Mark making is using any writing device (a marker, crayon, pencil, or pen) to color, draw lines, and shapes, which can encourage and even inspire students to want to write.
Pencil Grip Through the Ages
Providing opportunities for children to draw and color with crayons, markers, pens, pencils or any other type of writing utensil will assist in developmentally preparing the child to hold a pencil. At first, when children engage with writing utensils, they will often grasp the writing tool with their entire hand. This typically happens around 18 months (about 1 and a half years) to three years old. Being able to isolate fingers from the palm, like one does when holding a pencil correctly, requires fine motor control. Around 2-3 years old children’s grip is still developing.
By the time children are in preschool, around ages 3-4, they are developmentally ready to learn how to properly hold a pencil. Teaching grip helps students gain control over isolating their fingers to create a proper pencil grasp. A good pencil grip allows the fingers to move efficiently with the tip of the pencil. A mature pencil grip should not involve frequent movement of the wrist, whole hand, or arm. Increased movement in these areas creates a greater opportunity for fatigue, which should be avoided. A pencil grip where fingers are close to the point of the pencil and have more control sets children up to write neatly.
Teaching children the correct form is important because we want to set students up for success in their writing journey. If bad habits, like poor pencil grip, arise it can cause incorrect letter formation, spelling difficulties, delayed writing proficiency, lack of confidence, and even create hardships in reading and writing fluency.
Direct Instruction is Non-negotiable
Learning to write is about precision, not perfection. It takes time, patience, and positive reinforcement. Students need direct handwriting instruction to develop correct handwriting habits. Modeling letter formation is also crucial when teaching handwriting. Multisensory activities like verbally explaining the basic strokes and order that students are going to use for each letter and providing a visual example of where the letter should be positioned on the lines gives students something to look at and compare their letters too while they are learning and practicing. Visually drawing the letter on a white board or smart board increases student's ability to learn positive handwriting techniques. These aspects of letter formation are incorporated into Countdown and Blast through Really Great Handwriting.
Before grasping their pencil, students need to grasp what is being asked of them, creating a preparedness for when they are ready to learn and practice.
Language and Letter Formation:
Language plays a large role in handwriting; children need to be able to identify letters before writing them. If a child can’t imagine the letter, or say it, they are going to struggle to write it. Providing exposure to letters prior to teaching handwriting will help a smooth transition to familiarizing the child with the sound and shape of the letters they are learning.
Starting with basic strokes is much more approachable than jumping in and teaching 52 letters (26 lower case and 26 uppercase) and 10 numbers. Many children come into their preschool or kindergarten classrooms having learned how to draw a stick figure and if they can successfully draw a stick figure, they are already doing the basic strokes required for manuscript letter formation.
Starting with lines and shapes is an approachable gateway to starting letter formation. These strokes can then be combined to form letters.
Teaching children to write by hand is about more than just memorizing letter formations. Many senses are activated when writing something by hand. The brain sees the written symbol, recognizes them as letters, sounds them out, then puts the letters together to create words. Writing is a multisensory activity that builds the connections between letters and sounds.
eading and handwriting are closely connected. When children write letters by hand, they are also learning to recognize them visually. If children engage with books, they can also make a visual connection to the letters they are learning to write because they have seen them before.
Check out Really Great Reading’s Pre-K Sound and Letter Cards
Student Reflection is Key
Learning is a process that takes time and practice. Self-reflection encourages the learning process because students are completing their work, then going back and evaluating how they did. This helps establish that evaluation is more than “good” or “bad”, and isn’t just done by a teacher, rather it instills that students are able to acknowledge what they are doing well and what they are having a difficult time with. Learning to write will not happen overnight, it will take years to hone proper writing skills but providing a positive space to identify adjustments as students learn and continue to practice then self-reflection becomes normalized.
Modeling self-evaluation can be done with the I do, we do, you do technique. The teacher could write a line of the same letter, with 6-8 examples, (including tracing and practicing). Then they can review each letter with the class acknowledging what looks like the example and what doesn’t. Asking and answering questions like “is this letter in the lines?” or “does my top to bottom line look slanted?” Modeling like this shows students that learning doesn’t mean perfection. Rather, it teaches students that they can identify if they are meeting the criteria with the autonomy to identify what they did well while acknowledging challenges they had. This reflection is positive because it creates an environment for students to turn struggles into strengths based off their own assessment.
Really Great Handwriting has it all!
We help students understand how to decode the shapes and symbols on a page that represent letter sounds. Really Great Handwriting begins with essential skills like pencil grip, control, and positional awareness to lay a strong foundation for handwriting. Once those skills are established, we introduce letter formation, which boosts students' orthographic mapping abilities.
By combining these three critical areas, students develop a solid link between reading and spelling. This enables them to focus less on letter formation and more on writing, enhancing both their spelling and their ability to convey ideas. Research shows that mastering letter formation and phonics allows students to use their working memory more effectively, focusing on the content of their writing.
Let's talk about how Really Great Handwriting will benefit your students.
