How to help with...handwriting

Your child's handwriting is still evolving, but there ways you can help her find her own style. In this instalment of Spark Island's 'How to...' guides, primary school teacher Sean Callery offers some advice on how to make an impression.

In a nutshell

Neat handwriting impresses the reader, whether it has been written by adults or children. Children enjoy being able to produce neat, clear writing: it raises their self-esteem and makes them feel grown up. How can you help your child achieve this?

Handwriting is all about making the pen or pencil do what you want it to - being in control of it.

Sit comfortably, back straight - not bent over the page
Angle the paper slightly to the left (right for left-handers)
Balance the pencil between thumb and first finger
Rest the second finger underneath
If struggling with this, try holding the pencil a little higher up
Still a problem? Use a tripod (three sided) pencil or pencil grip
Don't give up on this - children who learn to hold their pencils in different ways find it extremely difficult to change their grip later

Check out these tips on how you can help your child's handwriting

Early help
Letter shapes
Keep it in proportion
Joining up
Moving on
Learning activities

Early help
Good handwriting begins with good colouring skills. Give her lots of chances to fill in and draw pictures. Encourage colouring up to the lines, and then staying in the same direction. All this builds pencil control. It might be worth placing her paper at a slight angle to the left, rather than straight in front of her. This makes writing and drawing easy. You can always hold it in place with some tape.

At this stage it is much better if she uses a pencil because it glides across the paper easily and is easy to correct if wished. Ball point pens are worst, because they scrape across. When she can write well, give her a rollerball pen before moving on to trickier, messier nibbed pens.

It is undoubtedly harder for left-handed children to write neatly, because the hand covers up the writing as it is done. Encourage her to angle the paper slightly to the right, and be patient!

Letter shapes
The most important thing when teaching children to write is to get them to start each letter in the right place. So the letter 'o' is begun at the top, the 'a' at the junction of the curve and the stem, and so on. The clearest benefit of this comes when you study 'b' and 'd'. These letters are very often reversed in children's writing, causing enormous confusion. But if you start the 'b' at the top, and the 'd' at the same place as for 'a', they are unlikely to be confused. Start by drawing letters in the air, in sand and the earth. Start slowly and then build up speed. As with all learning, little and often is best, such as five minutes a day.

Keep it in proportion
Encourage her to keep letters in proportion. The ascenders (tall letters like 't' and 'h') should be twice as high as letters that just rest on the line (like the vowels), and about the same size as the descenders, which go underneath the line (y, p, etc). At first, children tend to write fairly large as they concentrate on getting the shape right, but encourage her to reduce this in size early on. If necessary, paper clip a line guide underneath paper so that it shows through. To reduce the size of the writing, draw a new line guide with narrower gaps.

Joining up
Some schools teach children to join letters from the beginning. This is obviously harder than just printing, but it does produce a neater, better proportioned script, and there is evidence that children who join their letters find spelling easier. At least teach her to put a little hook on the end of her letters (apart from the descenders) so that joining will be easier later on.

Joining also puts a stop to a common fault in children's writing, that of putting capital letters in the middle of words. This is particularly common with the letter Q, perhaps because the capital is easier to write than the small version. Some children also get into the habit of always writing the first letters of their name in capitals - watch out for this!

Moving on
When children reach the age of about nine or 10, they often start to experiment by adding little touches to letters - especially making dots into little circles, or slanting the writing This seems to be partly a way of asserting their own personality, and you can sit back and relax about this unless the writing becomes unreadable - it is just her way of developing her own style.

Learning activities
Check out our Activity and resource finder where you'll find tailored learning activities to develop your child's skills in English, maths and science.