News Flash from AWN - July 13

The Electric Company Becomes a Daily Show on PBS Kids

Press Release from Sesame Workshop(NEW YORK, New York -- July 13, 2009) Get out your circuit breakers as THE ELECTRIC COMPANY turns into a power strip! Starting September 7th, Sesame Workshop's hit program THE ELECTRIC COMPANY, will be charging up PBS KIDS GO! with a daily dose of literacy superheroes and wily pranksters.

Six-to-nine year olds will be able to tune in every day to see Hector, Jessica, Lisa and Keith outwit their scheming neighborhood prankster-counterparts in a way that reinforces strong literacy skills and teaches kids that reading isn't just for school -- reading is cool.

"Reading and writing are critical developmental areas for children and children who are struggling with literacy skills by second grade are often at risk for never being able to catch up," said Linda Simensky, VP, Children's Programming, PBS. "By offering THE ELECTRIC COMPANY every weekday on PBS KIDS GO!, we are opening the doors for more children to explore reading and just how much fun it can be."Kids are plugged into THE ELECTRIC COMPANY making it the #1 show on PBS KIDS GO! in its block -- and the current doesn't stop there. The show's hit website, pbskidsgo.org/electriccompany, has had nearly four million site visits and over 11 million Electric Company video clips played since its launch in mid- January 2009.

Also this fall, THE ELECTRIC COMPANY will be partnering with local PBS stations, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as well as after-school organizations to bring a "Shock" to twenty cities nationwide with THE ELECTRIC COMPANY 2009 Circuit Tour. Starting August 8th, THE ELECTRIC COMPANY's star beat boxer, Shock, will host a 90 minute experience in each city beginning with a 25-minute multimedia, interactive show. The Circuit Tour will also include hands-on pre- and post-show activities that will engage kids with interactive content, games and demonstrations in an effort to give today's 2nd grader the literacy tools necessary to succeed in 3rd grade and beyond.

"We are thrilled to bring this critical piece of THE ELECTRIC COMPANY directly into communities around the country," says Randell Bynum, Director of Educational Outreach for THE ELECTRIC COMPANY. "We look forward to sharing a live, interactive Electric Company experience that will turn kids on to the power of reading."THE ELECTRIC COMPANY is part of PBS KIDS Raising Readers, a national literacy initiative focused on using public media to improve the reading skills for children ages two-to-eight, with an emphasis on children from low-income families. The effort is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and a Ready To Learn grant from the U.S. Department of Education, part of a cooperative agreement with CPB- and PBS.

We Should Teach Handwriting

In response to many on the internet who say that handwriting is becoming obsolete, I would like to say. No, No, No - It is as important as it always was. Please see the article below from the career and job site 'Highere' on 12th March 2009

Should you complete applications for employment in capital letters?

Capital Letters will draw attention and also irritate people. Most of the companies ask you to complete applicatoin for employment in Handwriting, as they want to either look at how you write, and or do a basic handwriting analysis to check on your profile. A few basic pointers in Handwriting analysis, that the companies watch out for:

1. Are you writing in a straight line (stable personality), dropping lines - lines going downwards (not confident), lines going upwards (over confident)

2. Do you punctuate properly, spell properly, to judge your language skills

3. Do you put the dots on your i’s or the dashes in your t’s, the dot missing means, you are casual about your approach, the dot preceeding the i, means that you think ahead, and the dot after the i means that you are running too fast.

This is just a guideline, and by no means a teaching of handwriting analysis. I am no expert of Handwriting analysis, but I personally accept applications in writing for people who join my company, to make sure they can write cleanly and have the right spellings. Pressing Spell check in a word file and or an online editor is a kid’s job, and a kid can write a classic document, but writing the proper way, with proper spelling by hand is a bit difficult.

Handwriting Readiness Pt.7 - Understanding Spatial Relationships

The directions that teachers use to teach handwriting in the school assume that children understand spatial and temporal(related to or limited by time) concepts. Hey what???

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These are obviously terms used to confuse any but the initiated, but all it really means is can they get their minds, to communicate to the hand, the directions the teacher is giving them. Terms such as "on top of the line, "above the line," or "between the lines" and many more, are used in handwriting instruction.
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An ability to understand these terms is acquired as children develop both physically and mentally. The age at which the average child begins to understand the position "in" is 2 years. Additional positions or locations are learned as the child increases in age, with the most challenging locations, "back/front" usually understood by the average child at 4 years 8 months.
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Practice in understanding locations or positions is covered in the preschool curriculum, but it is often assumed by Kindergarten teachers that this concept has already been gained and they proceed from there. If a student's concepts in this area are only a few months later in developing, than their entry to kindergarten, it can effect their self esteem, or belief in themselves, to the extent that they cease believing that they can succeed.

I'm going to get on my favourite hobby horse here, about mid-year intake in Kindergarten. What this actually does is take a child into Kindergarten who is approximately six months younger in age, skill and concept development and only give them half a year of Kindergarten before they are required to keep up with the curriculum in year one. Now I ask you - does that sound, in any way at all, logical to you, or good for your child? If you answer "Not logical at all." and you say "I'll never do that to my child", I'll give you an A++++++++. Please, please, please, even if you do think you have a genius on your hands, and you may, hold your child back until the beginning of the next year.

Activities to help your child with positions are fairly obvious. I've given you some below, but you'll probably think of lots more as you progress.

1. Take something in your hand. Hold it in different positions and ask your child to tell you where it is.

2. Find the object. Hide something and give the child instructions, one at a time, on how to find it. Use a lot of position words. such as in, on, under, over, above, through. If you want to brainstorm about position words use the sentence. "The fox jumped..................the gate." Any word that fits in the space in this sentence is a position or location word.

3. More advanced practice. Take a picture with objects in it and ask the child to describe to you where one particular object is. Make it simple to begin with - not many things on the page. As they gain skill you can make the picture more complicated. Repeat their instructions out loud as you find the object and be very positive when you do.

4. Give your child an object to hold and then give them instructions about where to hide it. You can leave it at that, or you can prolong the game by getting your little student to give someone else position/location instructions on how to find it.

Handwriting Readiness Pt.6 - Basic Stroke Formations

One of the hardest things for a child when learning handwriting, is fluency. He is so concerned with getting it right, that instead of a uniform curve or circle, it becomes a wobbly formation.

To help with fluency Danielle Dumont, an expert from France, teaches children using a ribbon and making waves and squiggles with the ribbon in the air (rather in the way that a gymnast uses the ribbon). Once the circles, waves and squiggles that the ribbon is making are fluent, transfer that same fluency with chalk to the chalkboard. This helps the student to feel that flow and to use it when working on a smaller area.

Proficiency in basic stroke formations is a tremendously important part of handwriting. What is an intelligent child likely to do, if you put some lined paper in front of him. with strokes done in dots - you then tell him to trace the strokes, but be careful not to go below the line? That's easy! He'll start at the line and go up the stroke so that he'll be sure to get it just right. It makes perfect sense to him, because he hasn't been told that this is practice for writing letters and they begin with a downward stroke and never an upward one. The solution to this is to explain this to him.

Except for v,w,x,y,z, which start with a slanted downward stroke or in the case of z a horizontal stroke, (none of which, by the way, begin on the line) all other small case letters start with either a vertical down stroke or a curve moving in an anticlockwise direction.

Children should never be taught how to write the letters, until they have considerable skill in tracing pictures or shapes. You can use ordinary cheap colouring books for this and textas or coloured pencils (thick, three sided ones). At this stage don't worry about the direction in which your child traces. The aim (or I could call it a game) here, is to trace without straying from the picture outline. He needs to be able to keep the texta or pencil tracing that line, for as long as possible, before he stops, lifts it up and then puts it down on the line, to begin tracing again.

Some of this can be done without you supervising. You'll usually be able to see the stops and starts and judge how proficient your child is becoming. It is wise though, to sit with him sometimes to observe and also the encourage - encouragement motivates! After the outlining is done, he may see the picture as being finished or he may want to colour it in further. Go with the flow. Colouring in also requires a certain control of the pencil.

Once he has shown proficiency (not perfection!!) with tracing, you can progress to formal pre-writing sheets. Here is where you need to sit with him and watch him like a hawk. It's good to verbalise with him as he does the strokes - 'start at the top and trace down'. He'll probably get sick of your verbalisation after a while and just want to get on with the job. Just tell him that you'll stop, but if he starts at the line and goes up, you'll have to help him again by verbalising. Children usually find this a fair bargain and it will motivate him to concentrate harder.

All the curved shapes on the pre-writing sheet must be done in an anticlockwise direction and again you need to watch all the time. Where to start when tracing circles?? Different writing schemes teach different ways, when the student begins on the letters of the alphabet. Picture in your mind a circular head with ears. Actually draw it, if you're working with your child. Some writing schemes teach that you form a,d,g,o,q by starting at the top of the head, or on the line, and drawing an anticlockwise circle. Then for f,s,c, you start just above the right ear, go up to the line and then proceed to finish your letter.

In theory this sounds fine, but what often happens is that students also persist in starting their f,s,c on the top of the circle, or on the line, too. It's so much easier to have an obvious starting point. You can imagine the finished product - it's long and skinny and undefined. I recommend starting all these letters above the right ear. It's much simpler in the long run and the letters have a better flow to them.

Okay! Getting back to pre-writing sheets - make a small mark on any circle just where the top of the right ear would be and get your child to begin tracing anticlockwise from there. If there are spirals, or any other curves, make sure they're traced in an anticlockwise direction too.

Handwriting Readiness Pt.5 - Utensil or Tool Manipulation

No! This doesn't mean that you get out the hammer, the electric saw and the drill set. It's just

psychologist's jargon for the level of skill, with which children use ordinary, everyday things like a spoon or fork, crayons, plastic scissors, glue brush, paintbrush, etc. Can they tie their shoe laces, clean their teeth properly, get a top to spin?

These are skills that can be developed. For those of us old enough to remember, there was junior mechano and the progression to the even smaller parts of the regular mechano, with the tools to join parts together. Most boys had a set of some size to make all manner of wonderful inventions. There were even small motors, that moved parts.

Then there were those kits with tiny pieces to build model, ships, cars and many other things. Hours were spent in this way and these were wonderful for creating exceptional manipulative skill with hands and fingers.

For girls, who had kind brothers, the mechano sets were often a favourite, but I also remember making pictures with tiny beads, learning to sew with tiny stitches, making little tea sets with clay, colouring, drawing, painting, or french knitting. I remember my brother was addicted to french knitting for a while. He ended up with a length that stretched all the way from the front fence to the back fence. We ended up making a mat with it.

And now the good news - all these things, including some great mechano are still available today, plus many more activities to get little fingers nimble and clever with manipulating tools - large and small - and increasing the strength of those tiny muscles needed to successfully guide a pencil.

Before we go any further, I want to stress, really stress, the importance of your prospective writer being given the thicker, three sided pencils to use. You can get them in plain lead and colours. I know they are more expensive and need sharpening more often, but they encourage the tripod grip and are much easier to manipulate than the thinner ones.

As in any kind of tool manipulation, there is a way to hold a pencil which has been proved to cause the least stress on hand muscles and help writing to flow more evenly. This is called the dynamic tripod grip. Children develop the habit of holding their pencils in ways different to this, for a variety of reasons. The most common reason, is participating in lots of writing before their hands are developmentally ready for it.

Other than forming a habit for the wrong pencil grip, the most common problem is how much pressure your young student is putting on the pencil. Some children press too hard, writing slowly and deliberately and putting great stress on the muscles in their hands and fingers. Obviously, this will prove to be very uncomfortable for them and they won't be at all motivated to practice their writing. To help them realise how hard to press, put their writing paper on a thin foam board. When they press too hard, their pencil will go through the paper into the foam. Make a game of it, to see if they can write without the pencil going through, but heavy enough to make the writing clear.

The opposite problem - not pressing hard enough - can be helped if you use paper with a carbon backing or just a piece of carbon paper stapled between two sheets of paper. If the writer doesn't press hard enough, the copy won't be seen on the sheet beneath.

Other ways to improve manipulative skills are:

1. String plastic, ceramic, glass or even beads you make yourself from paper mache etc, and decorate them.

2. Sew with wool to make felt hand puppets, pillows or clothes for dolls, little purses, marble bags or whatever your little creative genius desires.

3.Weave placemats with craft foam, coloured paper, craft ribbon, crepe paper or anything else you discover will work.

4.Make flower necklaces out of real flowers or the small craft ones.

5.Make pom-poms from two cardboard donut shapes and wool.

6.Make paper flowers from tissue, crepe or ordinary coloured paper. If you've used the type of paper, on which you can use glue, sprinkle with sparkle or decorate in some other way.

7. Check out a library book and learn to make origami animals. Best to check one out from the children's section if possible. Some of the designs can get very complicated.

8. Make paper chains as decoration. These can be used also to hang up and write the name of each book you've read together on a separate chain. It can cause great excitement and even motivate children to ask to have books read to them, to fill up the chain completely. Try having a blank chain for each month with a do-able number of links.

Handwriting Resource Links

These links come from a blog called Baraka Education (with permission) There may be some duplication of links that I have already entered on this blog, but many are new. I'm really indepted to Barakaedu. This must have taken days of research. She has only just begun her blog, but keep an eye on her. I'm sure there'll be more valuable information. By the way, she has a recipe section. There's only one there at the moment but I've tried it and it's delicious.

Prewriting Worksheets to help develop pencil control:

Donna Young Printing Readiness

Kidzone Pre-Printing Skills Practice

Preschool Learners Pre-Writing Worksheets

SEN Teacher Pre-writing Set 1 and Set 2

Free Handwriting Fonts.

If you're intending to send your child on to school, please find out which handwriting font that school uses and teach that one to your child. Otherwise there'll be a lot of confusion when school begins. If you're homeschooling, you can choose whichever appeals to you.

Jardotty

Learning Curve - cursive

National First

Primer Apples

Print Clearly

Trace Font

Zyia Learns Letters

Handwriting/Tracing Pre-made Worksheets

There are many thematic tracer (days of week or colours) or alphabet pages available.

Abcteach - tracing and letter practice worksheets in d’nealian and zaner bloser

Boggles World Alphabet Tracing Pages

First School Alphabet Handwriting Practice Sheets in Standard Block and D’Nealian, numbers, colours, days of the week, and months of the year with flowers

Handwriting for kids - also has a worksheet generator

Home Education Resources - reference sheets, print read colour, cursive. These are copywork rather than tracing.

Jan Brett Alphabet Tracers - traditional manuscript, cursive manuscript or modern manuscript all with beautiful illustrations

Learning Page has lots of worksheets - free to join and totally worth it!

Preschool Learners Handwriting Worksheets - helping your child to improve his handwriting, alphabet and rhyming words worksheets

Primary Games Activity pages - alphabet, numbers, colours and months of the year

PrintActivities.com - alphabet, numbers, shapes and names. They even have Aaliyah!

School Express Handwriting - alphabet and numbers in both modern and traditional

Sparklebox - lots of alphabet and number worksheets

Generators

These sites enable you to create worksheets using your own words.

Abcteach Handwriting Worksheet Maker

ESL Writing Wizard - search for other people’s pre-made worksheets also

Create tracing worksheets online

Handwriting for kids - also has pre-made worksheets

Online Fun

Handwriting animations of the alphabet

Writing the alphabet and numbers

Handwriting Readiness Pt.4 - Eye-Hand/Foot Coordination

Eye hand or foot coordination is simply seeing something and moving your hand or foot to intercept what you see. When you catch a ball or hit it with a bat, when you reach up to take something from a shelf, when you catch something you've dropped before it hits the floor (very good), when you kick a ball, when you simply walk up or down steps, you're using eye hand or foot coordination.

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Eye-hand coordination, although part of a child's conceptual development, is also a skill which can be improved with practice. You can't start too soon. Babies lying in their cots are building their hand to eye coordination as they watch a mobile move above them or reach out for toys you hold near them.

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From the age of about four months, your baby will use his mouth to discover the world around him. Hence everything he can get his hands on, goes to the mouth. From about six months his hands join in and begin to examine the object they're holding. By this time hand-eye coordination is established and he will begin to improve his fine motor movements and skills.

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Each child moves at his own pace with coordination between hands and between hand and eye, as he attempts more and more difficult tasks.So with hand-eye coordination the concept has developed early. From here on there is something you can do to help. It becomes a skill which improves with practice.

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You can step in and help your child to improve in this area.Blocks or the large Duplo are great for developing hand-eye coordination. Building with these helps your child learn what items fit most easily on one another and how much pressure to put on a block as he positions it. If your student is having trouble figuring out what to do, resist the temptation to jump in and show him how it's done. Part of the fun with these toys is discovering how they fit together and work. Doing it himself, gives your child's brain and skill building a much better work out than if you show him how.

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This isn't to say that you can't play with him. This is part of the bonding between you and your child and great fun for both of you.Following is a list of activities to advance your child's skill in eye-hand coordination:

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1. Lace cards - this involves sewing on a card with a large needle and different coloured wools or cottons to make a design.

2. Make mosaics with anything really. Try dried beans or peas, nuts, pasta, tissue paper or even small scraps of coloured paper.

3. Make tissue paper flowers by taking a strip of paper and rolling or folding it. Crepe paper is good and cheap for this too. It's colour does tend to run if it gets wet, but it comes in the most incredible colours - even fluorescent ones. Cellophane paper does a good job as well. It tears more easily, so takes more skill and let's not forget the silver foil from the kitchen. It makes great flowers, stalks and leaves.

4. Here's a messy one. Make paper mache glue and use that and paper to build anything you want. Come on! There must be something inside you that wants to get messy and if there isn't, it's probably more important to do it to stretch your borders. Here's a link for the recipe for the mache glue and some more ideas. Click here!

5. Play a game where you have to get a small ball into a cup. You can actually buy a toy that has the cup on a stick and the ball attached with string, but you can make one just as easily.

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6. Let's not forget all you mad golfers out there. Buy one of those cheap little plastic golf sets for your child and teach him how to putt.

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7. Whoops!! I almost forgot the most common. Play ball. First rolling to a younger child and getting him to roll back. Then throwing or bouncing a short distance. Make it further and further away as skills improve. Anyone remember that song "I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts. There they are a'hangin in a row" Well we don't have Coconut Shy Stalls anymore, but the idea is simply to aim the ball at any target - preferably not a brother or sister - and try to hit it, or knock it off something. Tin cans on a fence used to be a favourite one, but there'll always be something you can buy that will do the same thing, if you want to get fancy.

8. You can also get tough plastic adjustable basket ball equipment that will last your child for years, because you can adjust the height until they're seven or eight years old. Just make sure older brothers or sisters give your little one a go.

Handwriting Readiness Pt.3 - Small Muscle Development

Large muscle development in a small child's hands takes place quite early. Any parent who's tried to take something away from a child who really wants it, will vouch for this. However, there are numerous smaller muscles in the hand that need to strengthen before a child can successfully guide a pencil. If a student is asked to begin writing before he has full control over these muscles, letter formation will be effected.

Following are exercises to aid in the development of the smaller muscles in a child's hand.

1. Colouring and drawing with crayons is a great way to develop these muscles. The resistance that a crayon gives, strengthens the fingers and provides tactile (feeling) feedback to the brain in a way that textas and pencils will not. Colouring with crayons on construction paper will provide even more resistance.

Construction paper is a stiff, heavy, inexpensive matte or eggshell finish paper. Made from ground wood pulp, it is available in a variety of colors, and its primary application is children's arts and crafts and school projects. It can also be called sugar paper and is typically available in large sheets and sometimes rolls. The texture is slightly rough, and the surface is unfinished. Due to the nature of the source material from which the paper is manufactured, small particles are visible on the paper’s surface.

To save money on crayons and make the exercise more interesting, let the student peel the paper from the crayon stubs or broken crayons, that can't be used any more (great fine motor control exercise). Place them in foil made into different shapes and melt them into new rainbow coloured crayons.

2. Squeezing and rolling clay, plasticine or play dough is also good for strengthening tiny hands. Children love to roll it into a ball and then pushing holes in it with their thumbs or rolling out long sausage-like sections and making shapes with them. If you're working with play dough or plasticine children can cut the lengths with their craft scissors. For clay a ruler separates the pieces quite well, as long as the clay is soft enough.

3. Make stamps from potatoes or other vegetables. A spoon can be used for this and if the vegetable is too hard, just stick a fork in it a couple of times to help out. Doing the carving and then learning how much pressure to apply, to actually use the stamp is a terrific exercise for tiny hands. Tip: use paint and not ink for this.

4. Make old fashioned tin can lanterns with a hammer and nail. Take an ordinary tin can and remove the paper from the outside. With supervision let your child put holes all over it with a nail and small hammer. Then put a candle inside the can and the light will shine through the holes. The student can paint the outside of the can if he likes, but make sure that he doesn't use anything that will melt.

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5. Draw with chalk on a board or on the concrete pathways, steps, terrace, patio, outside brick wall - it will wash off with water. You can get packets of sidewalk chalk that's very thick so that your child won't scrape his knuckles on the concrete when he tries to draw.

6. Playing Jacks. Click here for a great explanation on how the game is played and there are other old fashioned games on this site that you might want to use with your child as well. Sometimes I think that the saying 'everything old becomes new again' is very true. For Jacks you can use flattish stones, you can still buy Knuckles or Jacks games from some games shops, or you can do it the way it was done fifty years ago by actually getting five sheep's knuckles from the butcher and leaving them on an ant's nest until they're nice and clean and dry and ready to be used - great natural science lesson. You can paint the bones different colours later or just leave them as they are.

Handwriting Readiness Pt.2 - What are Fine Motor Skills?

We take well developed fine motor skills for granted, but they are required for successfully completing simple tasks such as using a knife and fork, punching a phone number or texting on those tiny mobile phones. threading a needle or sewing, playing most musical instruments, playing computer games, gardening, using tweezers, putting on makeup and even tying your sneakers.

These fine motor skills are basic prerequisites for students to succeed academically. That's why helping children develop finger strength and tactile dexterity is so very important. Of course you can do this after they've tried to write well and failed, but it's much harder to turn a failure in any area into a success, than to put in the preliminary work necessary and go straight to success. The trauma of failure in front of all their peers, is not really something to which we want to introduce our children, in their first year of school.

If you take your child to a play group or preschool they will get some of the activities there, that are needed to develop fine motor skills. Don't, however, count on that!

Boys, especially, would in general, much rather be outside playing cars in the sandpit or climbing on the gym equipment, than sitting inside threading wool through a card or playing with the play dough. The preschool teacher will try to make sure that each child has an equal opportunity to develop both gross and fine motor skills, but don't just rely on that.

As a parent, keep an eye on your child's development. How skillfully does she use her knife and fork, can she tie her shoelaces properly - that doesn't mean eventually. If she need a few tries before she succeeds that's fine, but if she's up to number five or six and she's still not been successful, it may be a sign that she needs to further develop those fine motor skills. Another way to check is by doing some craft with her, where she needs to work with small items and note how nimble her fingers are.

There are so many fantastic activities you can do with your children at home, to help them develop great fine motor control. Some of them are messy, but aren't your kids worth that? If you're worried about the carpet, pick a fine day and take a card table or plastic table cloth outside. Maybe you'll have to move the daily grind around to make time for the activities, but just think of all the time you'll save later on in their lives, when you're trying to explain their homework to them and you're hitting a brick wall because failure has become ingrained in their minds.

Handwriting Readiness (Pt.1) in Children aged 3 - 6 years

"What's all this about handwriting readiness?" you might say. "You just give the kid a pencil and off she goes. Right!"

Well, actually, No! Giving your child pencils too early in their development, can quite often lead to illegible, untidy, badly formed and badly sized writing, which will take a great deal of time to correct later on - that's if it can be corrected. It takes a great deal of determination in a student to change a stongly ingrained bad habit and some find it just too hard.

Handwriting is a complex operation. Activities that use all senses (multi-sensory) and feeling and moving (kinesthetic), prepare students for letter and number formation before they begin learning to write.

Well developed fine motor skills are necessary for a student to write well and it is the very, very, rare three or four year old, who has these skills. A five year old, who has had sufficient pre-handwriting experiene may be ready, but sometimes a child may be even older before these skills develop.

Handwriting readiness is dependent upon the presence of seven foundational skills.

1. small muscle development
2. hand-eye coordination
3. utensil or tool manipulation
4. basic stroke formation
5. alphabet letter recognition
6. orientation to written language
7. understanding of spatial relationships
   

Fomal handwriting instruction can begin as early as kindergarten year and some children will take off and never look back. Some, however, will struggle for the rest of their lives, because one or more of the above seven developmental stages had not been reached, when they were required to learn letter formation.

In following blogs, I'll explain more fully the seven prerequisites for handwriting readiness and give activities that can aid in the formation of each.

IMPORTANT and again IMPORTANT

There also needs to be gross motor activities to get the brain going and give students more control over their bodies. Try dancing, little athletics, skipping, running around kicking a ball with them - get them moving and away from the TV and computer games. Not that these things are necessarily bad, but there needs to be balance.

Teaching Handwriting - Choose the Style

PENCIL GRIP

This pencil grip is recommended because it puts the least stress on the fingers and enables the writer to continue writing for a longer period without the hand getting tired.

Images from Draw Your World

PALMER STYLE






















HANDWRITING WITHOUT TEARS

MODERN MANUSCRIPT


















MANUSCRIPT

The Importance of Teaching Handwriting

Handwriting is really brainwriting. Hand(brain)writing reflects an individual's personality. The brain is the source of your personality, and it is actually your brain that writes. This means that each person's writing will be unique, because that person is unique. However, the basis of this individual handwriting needs to be taught. We need to start teaching children the right starting point, the right direction, the right position. We need to supervise and give them practice, practice, practice, so that their writing becomes fluent. From there they can change their handwriting to reflect their personality.

All this matters, educators say, because evidence is growing that handwriting fluency is a fundamental building block of learning. Emily Knapton, director of program development at Handwriting Without Tears, believes that "when kids struggle with handwriting, it filters into all their academics. Spelling becomes a problem; math becomes a problem because they reverse their numbers. All of these subjects would be much easier for these kids to learn, if handwriting was an automatic process."

The trend towards illegible handwriting is not likely to slow, proponents of penmanship say, as computers become even more common and school systems place less importance on teaching handwriting. Interest in teaching penmanship in America has reached such a low point, that the National Cursive Handwriting Contest for elementary school students will not be held during the coming year for the first time in its century-old history. This attitude towards handwriting is also becoming prevalent in Australia.

More and more, our schools are producing students who have severe problems with handwriting and spelling. It is of the utmost importance to make sure that your children can write legibly and fluently. If the schools are not teaching them, then for their sakes, you need to give them your help. For help to do this check out the links at the top of this blog. They are free resources.