Developing Handwriting Skills Among Pre-Schoolers

 

In this digital age, when the written communication is increasingly done through laptops and mobile phones, penmanship is on a decline. Nowadays children get exposed to keyboards, touchpads, and swipe buttons even before they are introduced to paper and pencil.

But because the new technologies have given us the options of keyboard, styles, and touchpads, should we ignore the importance of teaching effective handwriting skills to our pre-schoolers?

As an early years expert, my answer would be no!

We make the mistake of associating good handwriting to better scores in exams, but in reality, there are many more benefits that pre-schooler gains while practicing better handwriting - good vision, eye-hand coordination, muscle memory, pencil grasp, and letter formation. All of these together contribute to students' overall better academic performance, not only in reading and writing but also in mathematics.

We need to focus on while helping the pre-schoolers improve their handwriting: pencil grasp, letter formation, sizing of letters, copying words, spacing of words, sense of direction, proper pencil pressure, consistency in upper and lower case writing, etc.

At Vidhyashram International School, the top 10 schools in Jodhpur, we use multiple approaches to build good handwriting techniques among students. However, if parents want to see quick and desired improvements in the penmanship of their children, then a certain degree of re-enforcement at home can work wonders.

Tips to improve the handwriting of pre-schoolers:

• Work on hand-eye coordination - visual-motor skills which are vital for good handwriting, grows out of eye-hand coordination. The eyes and hands should work in close coordination to ensure that the letters are correctly formed and stay within the line. Preschool and parents of toddlers can rely on several activities to help kids gain better visual-motor skills. Some of these are playing outdoor games like catch and throw with the ball, badminton, basketball, doing art and craft activities with beads, stacking tower games with lego blocks, and solving maze puzzles.

• Encouraging environment – You should not rush into expecting that since your child has started preschool, he or she should have developed handwriting skills by now. For most children, good handwriting skills only start emerging at 5 years of age. Before that, parents should work on improving the pencil grasp and steadiness while making letter formations. Most of the pre-schoolers will start with a five-fingered grasp and gradually proceed towards a mature grasp. As parents and teachers, we should help them cope up at each stage and encourage their efforts.

• Proper posture and right stationery – we should not take an easy path when helping pre-schoolers improve their handwriting. Rather than making them practice handwriting by casually sitting on the bed or floor, they must sit on a proper table and chair while doing this exercise. Posture and angle play an important role in improving penmanship.

 We offer daily experiences to support the development of fine motor skills in the hands and fingers of our nursery and kindergarten students. We start with developing the strength and dexterity in their hands and fingers and then progress towards before they can be expected to master handwriting.

Building handwriting skills starts with a fun-writing exercise using sand, rice grains, or simple scribbling at the nursery level. As students graduate to Kindergarten, the focus shifts more towards more formal writing done into four-lined notebooks and helping them gain perfection in the left to the right pattern of writing and proper letter formation. Then comes the turn of practicing 2-3 lettered words in legible handwriting.

Our students can progressively do creative writing, copy text from the board and take dictation in their notebooks.

The approach and resources provided by the preschool are hugely instrumental in building the handwriting skills of children and getting them ahead in their future learning journey. So when you are selecting a preschool for your child, you must explore the curriculum and check what all activities are done to improve the writing and language skills of children. Vidhyashram International School, the English Medium School in Jodhpur,  education is the building block for primary school education, and acquiring good handwriting skills is a crucial part of it.