5 Keys to Improving Your Child's Handwriting
Most children aren’t concerned with having good handwriting. Therefore, improving your child’s handwriting is up to you.
That’s why it’s worth it for them to exercise their writing skills from a very young age and instill in kids the importance of having legible handwriting. Remind them that only by writing their messages well will they be understood by everyone.
In You Are Mom, we’ll share 5 keys for improving your child’s handwriting.
5 keys for improving your child’s handwriting
Key 1
In order for your child to improve their handwriting, the first thing you should do is encourage them to want to do it.
If having better handwriting isn’t something that motivates them, and on top of that, it’s tedious for them, you won’t get anywhere, no matter how much you demand or ask them.
That’s why we recommend you take a deeper interest in their writing and in the compositions and essays that their teacher asks them to do.
If your child notices that you’d like to read what they’ve just written, but that you can’t because you don’t understand their handwriting, next time, they’ll be more careful when drawing the lines. That’s because they’ll want you to understand the ideas and fantasies that they’re capable of expressing on paper.
Key 2
To improve your child’s handwriting, you must instill in them the importance of writing by hand. A child who uses a keyboard more than pen and paper to write will never be able to improve their penmanship.
Whether their handwriting is good or not depends on the psychomotor skills they have and that they develop in the early stages of learning.
If your child learned to use the computer before picking up a pencil and, what’s more, they replaced the manual skills that writing requires for the movement of their fingers on the keyboard, it’ll be very difficult to achieve a legible and beautiful writing.
Therefore, from this minute, your child must write more by hand than on the computer, cell phone, or tablet.
Keep in mind that written language is only learned and developed by repeating the same lines. And if your child doesn’t practice, they won’t be able to master this skill.
Key 3
To write well, you have to sit well and stay in a comfortable position. Teach this to your child.
If they sit hunched over, write on rough or unstable surfaces, lie on the floor…
If they write vertically with the page against the wall, use a pencil that’s too small or with a very long tip…
Or if the pencil doesn’t draw well on the paper and they have to apply too much pressure to make the letters appear… All of this can negatively affect their handwriting.
In short, there are many factors that can affect keep handwriting from being legible and make sentences look sloppy.
Your child must learn that the correct writing position occurs when we lean our backs to the back of the chair and keep ourselves straight but comfortable.
Teach them that they shouldn’t lean over their paper and that they should keep it at a slight angle to make it easier to write. Finally, tell your child that the opposite hand is in charge of holding the paper.
Key 4
Teach your child the correct way to hold the pencil but tell them that this isn’t a rule that should be the same for everyone. When it comes to this point, comfort is also important.
There are children who, in order to grasp a pencil, rest their thumb on the middle finger on it. At the same time, others grab it like a clamp with their index finger and thumb. And, in the same way, there are those who simulate a cone and join their middle, index, and thumb fingers to hold the pencil.
There are countless ways to hold a pen or pencil. Let your child find the one that they feel the most comfortable with.
Key 5
Practice makes perfect.
If not daily, at least three times a week, invite your children to write and do calligraphy exercises where they make the same strokes over and over again.
Only then will they be able to improve their handwriting.
Moms and dads, we recommend that from an early age, you awaken in your children a love for reading and an interest in drawing figures and making lines by hand.
For this, buy them story books and colored crayons for them to draw during their playtime.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
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