Fridgeworthy: Handwriting Practice for Home
Strategies to Motivate Handwriting Practice
If your little one doesn’t like to sit still long enough to finish a PB&J, you might think handwriting practice isn’t a battle worth fighting. If you don’t have teaching experience, you also may feel overwhelmed—like you don’t know where to start.
We’re here to support you. Not only is handwriting practice possible, it can be fun. Here are some handwriting practice tips for your active, hands-on learner.
Write With Your Child
Go for the visual. When teaching your child to make a line, shape, or letter, start with an example. Have your child watch you make the line or shape and encourage them to copy. This helps them know what to aim for.
Use the hand-over-hand technique to help your child learn the motions. Place your hand over theirs to guide their hand through mark making. You can do this with lines, shapes, and letters. Once they get the feel of it, they’ll start to create the marks on their own.
Language choice. Use simple, consistent language to break letter writing into steps. If you’re lost for words, the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum provides printouts with simple steps to say during letter writing. The letter “A,” for example is, “big line, big line, little line.” The curriculum also numbers each step.
Fun is motivation. For pre-writing, choose a picture or make up a story to go with the handwriting task. When drawing horizontal lines, you could say, “Let’s build a bridge so our toy dinosaur can cross the river.” If you’re feeling ambitious with a blue crayon, you can even draw a river. As your child learns more letters, let them choose words, pictures, or stories to build from.
Pre-Writing: Making Lines and Shapes
Pre-writing is a foundational skill that prepares your child to write letters. Scroll to learn more about pre-writing strokes by age. There’s also some activity suggestions for practice.
Not sure where to start? Need extra support for back to school?
Click here to register your 4-6 year old for our Pre-K Readiness Group. Don’t miss out on some hands-on, peer-centered handwriting practice. Class starts on September 19th.
Ages 2-3: The Markup Breakdown
Your child will have a palmar grasp at this stage of development. So, they’ll hold the writing utensil in their palm while making a fist, with the point poking out the pinky side. This is the same grasp your child uses to pluck up a flower and hold it—you can think of the stem as the pencil point.
Ages 2–2½ Prewriting Stroke: Vertical Line
Trees in the forest. Flowers in the field. Train tracks. Whatever your child is interested in, relate it to the activity of drawing vertical lines in a row, from top to bottom.
Top to bottom. When we form letters, we make strokes from top to bottom. To start them out, draw an example of three vertical lines in a row. You can also draw one dot above another dot and have them connect the two. This gives them a start and end point to get a feel for the writing stroke.
Extra fine motor snazz. You can even incorporate peeling and sticking some snazzy stickers on the paper to give them an extra fine motor coordination activity. Your child will look forward to handwriting practice and be motivated to decorate their beautiful creation at the end.
Age 2½ Prewriting Stroke: Horizontal Line
Left to Right. Guide your child’s hand to learn the habit of making marks left to right. This is an important foundational skill–we make letters and words from left to right.
Dots and Stickers. Like our vertical line strategy, draw some dots or some stickers across from each other on a piece of paper—this will give a starting and ending point for the horizontal line. Your child will need you to guide their hand to place stickers. This will help the lines end up horitontal.
Age 3 Prewriting Stroke: Circle
“It’s your head, mom.” Or a sun, a grape, a tire. Pepperoni pizza for circles within circles.
Draw a circle clockwise and counterclockwise. Model then do it with them using hand over hand. Practicing each direction helps your child be flexible in letter formation–the letters “b” and “d” require making a curved shape in different directions.
The Markup Breakdown: Ages 3½ – 4
Your child will have a static tripod grasp or quadrupod grasp at this stage of the handwriting game. This is when the hand flips. The tip of the writing utensil sticks out from a three-fingered grip: thumb, index finger, and middle finger. You want your child to move towards the tripod grasp—the most appropriate position for handwriting.
Ages 3 ½–4 Prewriting Stroke: Cross
Lines can cross each other? A new discovery. This opens possibilities for more letters like “t” and “f.”
At this stage of the handwriting game, your child has the prewriting skills to make a basic stick figure. Once they get the hang of the circle shape, they can draw the whole family. Soon they’ll be able to draw and write names above each family member.
Fridgeworthy material comin’ your way.
The Markup Breakdown: Ages 4-6
The tripod grasp solidifies in this scad of time.
A fun, general tip: paint with cue tips. You can also use colorful pens or markers that have a very thin shaft. This naturally brings the thumb, index finger, and middle finger together to a tripod grasp.
Age 4 Prewriting stroke: Square
Square if you dare. Age four is when your child will start to connect lines, and calibrate when to stop and connect them to create shapes. Now they can make some bricks for a house—that stick figure family will be warm and cozy.
Age 4 ½ Prewriting stroke: Diagonal Line
Add a sloped roof to that cozy house. We want to keep the rain out–R…A…I…N. Hey! They can spell out some more words now. This stroke helps your child make letters like A, V, and N.
Age 4, 11mo Prewriting stroke: The “X” Shape
Criss cross. Your child can now conceptualize how to cross diagonal lines. This concept helps with the “zig-zag” letters like X, W, Y, and Z.
Age 5+ Prewriting stroke: Triangle, Other Shapes
All the letters. Your child can now draw almost any shape which prepares them to make all the letters of the alphabet. We can add the tricky “K” to the list.
Handwriting Practice Activities
The Handwriting Without Tears curriculum includes free worksheets for practice–these can be accessed on their home website under resources. For the letter-making printouts, you’ll see arrows close to the letters. These show your child which direction each part of the letter goes and which part to draw first. Your child can use them as a guide for practice until they get the hang of writing freehand.
In addition to the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum, there are oodles of options for handwriting practice activities.
Vertical surfaces. Writing and tracing on a vertical surface such as a window, chalkboard, or wipeboard are fabulous options. Writing on a vertical surface helps your child develop upper body strength and coordination. It’s a lot for the shoulders and elbows but the work is worth the strong writing skills.
Chalk outside. A change of scenery is sometimes just what your child needs to motivate writing practice. Sidewalk chalk is a special, fun activity for pre-writing strokes. It’s also a fun activity to teach the directionality of letters—draw letters big and have your child walk or trace the writing stroke. You can draw arrows to indicate directionality.
Chalk Note: Due to the rugged texture of most outdoor surfaces, sometimes it can be difficult to practice accurate direction and sequence of letters on concrete - just be aware of how you’re modeling letters.
Play-doh. Create letters out of play-doh for a great hand strengthening and letter-building activity. You can even use cookie dough for a tastier learning experience.
Tracing letters with sensory things. Trace letters with wax sticks for a hands-on letter learning experience. You can also use stickers, shells, sequins, or pom pom balls to improve eye-hand coordination and practice directionality.
How to Improve Handwriting: Letter Formation Groups
When it comes to learning how to write letters, learning capitals first is the easiest and the best place to start. When your child is ready for lowercase letters, letter formation groups may help.
Letter formation groups are letter families that use similar stroke patterns. Formation groups are a great place to start for handwriting practice and learning to write letters. Focusing on each group is helpful, but it’s not the only way to teach handwriting. Just another option to get started once your child has mastered all the pre-writing strokes.
*this image was created from information in references (1), (2), (3)
For the lowercase letters…
Group 1: Encourage your child to make the letters from top to bottom, just like they practiced with the trees–vertical lines–in prewriting.
Group 2: For group 2, It may help to revisit the circle prewriting stroke and have your child draw a half circle clockwise. Some professionals recommend writing these letters without picking up the pencil to make handwriting smoother. Although there’s no hard evidence to back this claim, it’s worth a try. It may increase the legibility of your child’s handwriting. It may also help them to write quicker in the long run.
Group 3: Revisit the circle prewriting stroke and have your child draw a half circle, counterclockwise. This stroke is the basis for most of these letters. A friendly reminder, we’re still writing from top to bottom, left to right.
Group 4: Kids have a hard time with these letters, so we recommend taking breaks and lots of positive reinforcement for effort–even if the results take a bit longer.
Thank You
Thank you for guiding the hands that hold our tomorrow. It’s important work. We’re inspired by your perseverance.
If you need extra support with handwriting, back-to-school readiness, or would like more information regarding therapy services, please reach out. We’re here to support you.
Click here to contact us.
Blog written and formatted by Victoria S. Eilers, COTA/L
Practicing Occupational Therapy Assistant, and Copywriter at The Copywriting COTA
Additional Blog support provided by Shelby O’Connor, OTR/L
References
(1)https://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Handwriting-Letter-formation.docx https://www.lifescapesd.org/resources/education/what-are-pre-writing-skills
(3)https://www.griffinot.com/letter-formation-families-teach-handwriting/
https://www.lwtears.com/solutions/writing/handwriting-without-tears
https://www.the-elbowroom.com/news/stages-of-pencil-grasp-development/
https://www.otoutside.com/news/2020/5/13/progression-of-writing-skills
https://makingenglishfun.com/2022/06/06/what-is-the-order-of-letters-to-teach-handwriting/