Have you ever had your child complete a handwriting workbook hoping it would magically improve their writing?
You didn’t see an improvement in the handwriting but you did see the workbook got completed. What’s going on? Right?! Let’s talk about the three things that you actually need to have in order to improve your child’s handwriting legibility. (We will even figure out why the workbook alone doesn’t work. )
- Explicit (specific) instructions. Explicit would look like, “we’re gonna start the letter here. We’re gonna stop the letter here. We’re gonna make a small line from the top to the bottom. We’re gonna make a small curve then go straight up then back down”. Those are explicit instructions. We are telling a child exactly what to do to make that letter. Usually, a workbook will give them an opportunity to trace. It only gives visual feedback.
- Repetition is very important. Repetition is what’s gonna help them relearn because some of our kids are relearning. If they have illegible heavy writing, we want them to relearn how to write correctly so that they can read their own writing. Spacing Golden Rules of Spacing and What we Should Never Say if we Want to Improve Handwriting say to the kids as feedback makes a HUGE impact on their path towards legible writing.
- Multi-sensory experiences. Are you wondering what in the world multi-sensory is? I’ll tell you what it doesn’t look like. It doesn’t look like a lot of pencil and paper. We want them to experience it and the best way for them to experience is using a multi-sensory approach. Involve as many senses as possible:
- Use silly voices to say
- Use blocks or legos to show letter size
- Use sand or paint to practice writing the letters
- Go outside and write on the sidewalk with chalk
- Use big motor movements
- When in doubt, stay away from sitting down with just a pencil and paper.🤪
Once they know it, once they felt it, once they’ve had a lot of practice with it then let’s use the workbook as one of the ways we get them to practice but don’t replace them with the workbook.
Watch video HERE
