HANDWRITING--Seven Ways to Improve

From CurrClick.com Weekly Newsletter 5/31/11

Seven Ways Guaranteed to Improve Your Child’s Handwriting

Do you find yourself cajoling, wheedling, demanding and insisting on handwriting practice? A child can be resistant to practice because some small changes are needed to meet the needs of the child.

Most children struggle to learn proper penmanship. It is a huge developmental task for them. Many burn out, not for lack of practice but for lack of some relatively small adjustment to be made or activity presented.

Here are seven golden tips that are guaranteed to improve your child’s handwriting.

Appropriate desk height - To measure the appropriate desk height for your child, have him hold his arm at his side with the elbow bent at a 45-degree angle. When his forearm can rest on the tabletop, this height will give good writing posture. It is also important to have a chair that allows his feet to rest flat on the floor.

Pencil grip - Teach your child early on the correct pencil grip. An incorrect grip is a hard habit to break. We use the word “grip”, but in reality the pencil should be gently held. A test of this is to slowly pull the pencil from between your child’s fingers. It should slide out easily. To teach the correct grip, lay the pencil across the thumb and second (index) finger. Then, grasp it near the point with thumb and index finger. This pencil position provides easy control without the cramping experienced with many other holding methods.

Copy strip - While learning and using italic handwriting, whether manuscript or cursive, your child will need a model from which to easily work. A copy strip with the letterforms is a great help. Prepare a strip of lined paper with each of the letters of the alphabet, written in the manner you expect your child to print or write. You can copy the appropriate letters from the italic handwriting book. Then, post the copy strip where penmanship practice takes place. Cover the strip with clear, self-adhesive paper to make it last longer.

First lessons - It can be helpful to begin with a desktop whiteboard and erasable markers. Make a couple of models on the board, commenting where the letter begins and how the strokes are made. Let your child copy the letter as many times as necessary to learn its form correctly. This might be the whole lesson for one day. When your child knows the form, move to lined paper. Show him where the parts of the letter go and give him an opportunity to practice under your watchful eye. Evaluate his writing with comments on letter formation. An example might be, “I like the shape of the oval” or, “Look how nicely this letter touches the top (or bottom) of the line.” Evaluating in this way prepares your child for evaluating his own writing.

Self-evaluation - Another method to encourage good penmanship is to have your child evaluate his own writing at the end of each practice based a scale that includes: letter form, height, spacing, and consistency. If he is working on an individual letter, have him look at each line, choosing his best and worst let

Writing projects - One of the things I’ve found that motivate students to improve their penmanship is to give them something to produce. A special penmanship project such as one of these could be offered to your child: • Letters to friends, • Verses on fancy paper to hang on their walls, • Poetry to copy (their own, or one they hear and like) and send to someone or to put on a poetry bulletin board, or in their copy notebook, • Cards of all types, • Titles for drawings, • Non-fiction re-writing to put into publication (journal, science newsletter), • Family history or newsletter, • Historical document in poster form, • Final copies of stories sent to friends or family members.

Other ways to practice penmanship - For just practice of penmanship, some things can be used that are practical, but don’t add much to the student’s work load such as the following: • One day a week use spelling list; • Poetry, verses, or historical documents being memorized; • Spelling or grammar rules to be written in a notebook; • Final copies of stories, letters, thank you notes, or other documents; • Lists to be memorized.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Curriculum
http://www.livingbookscurriculum/.

A Work in Progress

It's interesting being a home school teacher because I can notice steps of growth more closely than I did even as a classroom teacher. In the classroom, the curriculum dictated to a great degree what I was to teach and when I was to teach it, so monitoring the individual students growth was often set aside as I evaluated if the class as a whole was prepared for the next step. I can honestly say I wasn't as aware of doing this then as now that I only have one student on which to focus.

Narration is a big part of the Classical Education concept, so starting even last year with FIAR there are many times that after reading something I ask Micki to tell me what it was about and then I write down what she dictates to me. I usually try to use her handwriting paper and her penmanship style so as a way to review penmanship skills with her. Another nice aspect is a little less hands on work for me! :-) Win-win!

The next step was for me to write down things and for her to copy them onto her paper. This started with simple things like labeling items & spelling words to more "extensive" things like notes. I usually write things on a small white board using her penmanship style. Sometimes I will even erase items as she completes it or only write one sentence or word at a time, so she doesn't feel quite so overwhelmed.

Just within the last few weeks, Micki has made a nice big jump. She has thank you notes to write for her birthday, so I thought I'd see how well she did writing them straight from brain to paper. I was right beside her assisting in sounding out words as need. I always knew I could pull out the white board if it was too much, but she was ready for the challenge.

It was really cool to see her put various tasks she had learned to use. She knew how to spell and write many words especially sight/Dolch words from memory. Some may think this is not that big of a deal, but it is. Being able to spell a word orally is a different skill than being able to write the same word. That's why writing spelling words over and over again may be helpful to remember them for a written spelling test but not as helpful for a spelling bee.

She also did a great job sounding out words that she didn't recall from memory such as "gifts" or "present." It was encouraging to hear my 5 year old say, "OK, end of sentence, so I need a peradid [Micki speak for period]."

So, this means that I will be turning more and more writing over to her. Not all at once by any means, especially since she's only 5 and doing 5th grade work, but definitely giving her more opportunities to grow in personal writing skills beyond just penmanship.

Handwriting, Literature, and Art...Oh, My!

As a teacher, I have always loved combining subjects. It give more meaning to what is done and therefore, makes it more memorable.


Micki memorized a poem entitled "The Caterpillar." Obviously, we used the poem as a springboard for an art project.

What you don't see is that she also copied the poem and we glued it to the back of her artwork. I only had her do two lines of the poem at a time, so it wouldn't be overwhelming. It was really interesting because you could see her handwriting improve from the beginning to the end.

While I do use a penmanship curriculum to continue her skills, now that she knows how to write, I integrated copywork more and more. Eventually, I want it to be all copywork until I get ready to teach her cursive. Copywork is a very "classical" way of handwriting. Part of the concept is that you have them copy things not only to practice handwriting, but also to expose them to literature, principles, and English grammar. You gotta' love multi-tasking.

Cursive writing may be fading skill, but so what?

Just thought this was an interesting article...

By TOM BREEN, Associated Press Writer Tom Breen, Associated Press Writer – Sat Sep 19, 9:44 am ET http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090919/ap_on_re_us/us_cursive_angst


CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Charleston resident Kelli Davis was in for a surprise when her daughter brought home some routine paperwork at the start of school this fall. Davis signed the form and then handed it to her daughter for the eighth-grader's signature.

"I just assumed she knew how to do it, but I have a piece of paper with her signature on it and it looks like a little kid's signature," Davis said.

Her daughter was apologetic, but explained that she hadn't been required to make the graceful loops and joined letters of cursive writing in years. That prompted a call to the school and another surprise.

West Virginia's largest school system teaches cursive, but only in the 3rd grade.

"It doesn't get quite the emphasis it did years ago, primarily because of all the technology skills we now teach," said Jane Roberts, assistant superintendent for elementary education in Kanawha County schools.

Davis' experience gets repeated every time parents, who recall their own hours of laborious cursive practice, learn that what used to be called "penmanship" is being shunted aside at schools across the country in favor of 21st century skills.

The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.
"We need to make sure they'll be ready for what's going to happen in 2020 or 2030," said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English.

Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, she said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting.

"They're writing, they're composing with these tools at home, and to have school look so different from that set of experiences is not the best idea," she said.

Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University's College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they'll replace it entirely before long.

"I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds."

For Jeffers, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of "a gift."

That fear is not new, said Kathleen Wright, national product manager for handwriting at Zaner-Bloser, a Columbus, Ohio-based company that produces a variety of instructional material for schools.

"If you go back, you can see the same conversations came up with the advent of the typewriter," she said.

Every year, Zaner-Bloser sponsors a national handwriting competition for schools, and this year saw more than 200,000 entries, a record.

"Everybody talks about how sometime in the future every kid's going to have a keyboard, but that isn't really true."

Few schools make keyboards available for day-to-day writing. The majority of school work, from taking notes to essay tests, is still done by hand.

At Mountaineer Montessori in Charleston, teacher Sharon Spencer stresses cursive to her first- through third-graders. By the time her students are in the third grade, they are writing book reports and their spelling words in cursive.

To Spencer, cursive writing is an art that helps teach them muscle control and hand-eye coordination.

"In the age of computers, I just tell the children, what if we are on an island and don't have electricity? One of the ways we communicate is through writing," she said.

But cursive is favored by fewer college-bound students. In 2005, the SAT began including a written essay portion, and a 2007 report by the College Board found that about 15 percent of test-takers chose to write in cursive, while the others wrote in print.

That was probably smart, according to Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who cites multiple studies showing that sloppy writing routinely leads to lower grades, even in papers with the same wording as those written in a neater hand.

Graham argues that fears over the decline of handwriting in general and cursive in particular are distractions from the goal of improving students' overall writing skills. The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.

Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that 26 percent of 12th graders lack basic proficiency in writing, while two percent were sufficiently skilled writers to be classified as "advanced."

"Handwriting is really the tail wagging the dog," Graham said.

Besides, it isn't as if all those adults who learned cursive years ago are doing their writing with the fluent grace of John Hancock.

Most people peak in terms of legibility in 4th grade, Graham said, and Wright said it's common for adults to write in a cursive-print hybrid.

"People still have to write, even if it's just scribbling," said Paula Sassi, a certified master graphologist and a member of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation.

"Just like when we went from quill pen to fountain pen to ball point, now we're going from the art of handwriting to handwriting purely as communication," she said.