Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy handwriting getting worse?

I am looking at DS7's papers. His handwriting is significantly worse than a year ago. At the end of K his writing was much better than now. Thoughts? Common?

Impatience. Time pressure. More complex content. In K teachers actually spent time helping with handwriting. Still bugs me that my DS7 spent hours in class listening to math and other content well beneath his level, but no time spent helping him with his haandwriting. The random: go slower is not helpful. We talked to one place to helpl with handwriting and they immediately said he is holding his pencil wrong for one thing.

My son and I are working on cursive this summer using HWT (Handwriting Without Tears). And if we have time we are going to review printing which his you can't read at all.

When school starts I am sending in some HWT workbooks for him to use when he zooms through all his work. Usually he reads. There is no reason why he cant do two pages from HWT put that away and then still have time to read. When I work with him generally he doesn't like for me to "instruct" him very much (the teacher's manual has all sorts of activities you can do for the instruction). The description and illustrations are enough for him.

If he doesn't improve by the end of this next school year I am going to take him for some private OT.

Back when my son was 5, his handwriting was quite good. It has gotten worse each year since then. I think his problem is a combination of some sort of fine motor/motor planning thing and the need to write more quickly.

DS's handwriting was never fantastic, but is definitely worse now than it was a couple of years ago. When he really works at it, it can look pretty good, but most of the time he has so much he wants to dump on the page that it ends up looking pretty bad. His 2nd grade teacher gave him an S for handwriting, much to our surprise. She told us that as long as she can read it, it's fine.

I am hoping to get him started on HWT to learn cursive this fall, and I let him practice keyboarding pretty frequently.

It could be a number of things:

1) Is it really messier than it was in K, or does it seem to be messier when compared to his grade-level peers? As MoN mentioned, if this is the case, it's possible he's dysgraphic - the messy printing (reversed letters, not following lines, difficulty with spacing etc) looks much more "normal" in K-1 than in later grades, when nt kids' handwriting legibility and neatness keeps improving at a much faster rate than dysgraphic kids.

2) Has he had his vision checked lately? My dd who has poor eyesight has really sloppy handwriting - when she can't see. When she's wearing her glasses and when she's not seeing double vision etc, she has very neat handwriting. OTOH, I can absolutely tell just by looking at her papers when she's written something and wasn't wearing her glasses.

3) It's quite possible it's simply a factor of changes in *why* your ds is writing - in K, chances are the writing samples you saw were handwriting-specific exercises, and the attention was on proper formation of letters, spacing etc. Now that he's in 2nd, chances are he's writing to *write* - sentences, stories etc - so now the focus is on content not handwriting. If that's the case, you should be able to sit him down with a handwriting worksheet and watch him write and all should look a-ok. I wouldn't necessarily worry about this either - most kids' handwriting *while* writing for content does improve with time.

4) Check his pencil grip - does it look normal? Is his posture ok? If not, try having him correct his grip and/or posture and practice holding it all correctly when he writes.

Best wishes,

polarbear

I wouldn't become too distressed over it. These days most schools stop practicing hand writing completely after the third grade. The reality of it is hand writing simply isn't that important in everyday life and is becoming less and less so. Should a child be able to write by hand? Of course. Is it important that they have extremely neat hand writing? Not really, as long as they can read their own hand writing from the notes they take....unless they might be moving into an eventual career where better is required of course.

Old Dad, I completely agree with you re the importance of neat handwriting in our high-tech society... but fwiw, in my experience parenting a child who is dysgraphic - school didn't let go of handwriting lessons by 3rd grade, or of the expectation of neat handwriting - some teachers are all about computers, others are very caught up in the importance of handwriting. Most students (at least in our city) are still relying on handwriting for the majority of their school work well into high school, and for sure at the elementary and middle school levels. Not because the kids can't type or don't want to be using typing, but because that's how assignments are given out in school and because technology isn't available to most students across the board in all classes at school. Handwriting legibility/neatness is still looked at by some teachers.

Anyway, the real reason I'd want to understand what's behind it is very simple - if it *is* something like dysgraphia or other functional issue (which it most likely isn't, but just in case) - life isn't as simple as saying "handwriting doesn't matter anymore". Getting accommodations in place for dysgraphic kids can take a lot of advocating, and dysgraphia also usually means there is more going on than simply what looks like messy handwriting.

Sorry if that sounded like I am on a soap box - didn't mean for it too!

Best wishes,

polarbear

If the poor handwriting is resulted of improper pencil grip, then there are a couple of things you can try:

(1) monkey bar. This is the most efficient grip training exercise. More hanging time means better handwriting.

(2) cotton balls. Put a couple of contton balls in her palm. This will help her to have better sense of three-finger gripping.

My DD went from near-perfect writing to illegible scrawl between K-1st, and it was a way to signal that she was becoming disengaged with school, because she no longer cared. She learned cursive last year in homeschool, and found it to be fun.