Handwriting -Huh! What is it good for?
More than you may think!
I know, I know, I’m a play based educator. It’s kind of my “thing”. And, to be honest, handwriting instruction has always been NOT my thing. I find it frustrating. I mean, if the students would just form their letters the way I tell them, we’d all be happier! But that’s not how it goes.
As a play based educator, there is always the tension between giving the students autonomy in their learning and direct teaching. I will just say here, there must be time for both in a kindergarten class. There are concepts that do need to be taught directly, though the learning becomes ingrained through the play. The whole day should never consist of direct instruction, but there should be time within your schedule for learning letters, both formation and phonics.
We’ve gone through phases in education, as we do. Many of us Gen X and older teachers can remember spending time in class making lines up and down, across, circles, etc. over and over. We were told how to hold the pencil, and how not to hold the pencil. Some of us have horror stories of being smacked with a ruler if we didn’t do it properly. We never were told why, just that this was how you do it.
Many millennials (particularly on the younger end) and younger don’t have those memories. They learned what the letters looked like, how to write them, but never in nearly as formal ways as older generations. My own children (31, 28, 26) have atrocious handwriting and “interesting” pencil grips.
So, why is it important? We have keyboards now! We don’t need to print, we can just type!
Ah, but it isn’t as simple as that.
In the past 15 years, though, thanks to the Occupational Therapists working with my particular school board, I have re-learned the importance of proper letter formation and proper pencil grip.
I like to think of it this way: there is a direct connection from the fingers to the brain, so when we learn to form letters properly, we are also learning to recognize that letter. Couple that with learning the letter sound, and you are getting more bang for your buck!
Proper letter formation builds fine motor muscles, which are sorely lacking in our children. Learning to sit properly while working builds our core muscles, another area we are lacking in this modern society. Learning letter formation helps with learning our letters, learning our concepts of a word, and our concepts of print.
“Correct letter formation and writing forms the foundation for creating neural pathways that are essential for reading, memory, visual skills and higher neural efficiency.” So says this article from The Play Projects:
https://theplayprojects.com/why-learning-correct-letter-formation-matters/#:~:text=Correct%20letter%20formation%20and%20writing,skills%20and%20higher%20neural%20efficiency.
Your Therapy Source digs even deeper into the importance of letter formation here:
https://www.yourtherapysource.com/blog1/2019/09/20/letter-formation/
Both of these are respected sources.
Proper letter formation builds stamina in writing. When we know our letters and have automaticity printing them, we are able to write our thoughts out more efficiently and effectively. We can build our stories from simple sentences to books. On a personal level, I wouldn’t worry too much about letter formation during independent writing time, as I wouldn’t want to weigh them down with that expectation and stifle their creativity. However, in group writing, and in letter practice, I can be a stickler that we form those letters the way we have learned.
Something I have noticed this year, particularly, is a correlation between letter formation and the concepts of the printed word. My students who consistently struggle with proper letter formation, also struggle with the idea that we write from left to right, and that letter order matters for words. I am not saying that improper formation leads to struggles in our reading and writing (beyond legibility), because I have not done research in this area, but I do wonder if there is a correlation between the two. This wondering has made me focus more on the formation and emphasizing proper formation and pencil grip this year. It is a routine we have daily when learning our letters, and now weekly in order to solidify it.
How about you? What are your thoughts on letter formation? Important? Not? Do you use a particular program or do you have your own sequence you follow? Let’s talk about some of these more mundane tasks from our day! We may find what we view as mundane is actually the bedrock of our education!
