I know there have been threads on this in the past, but my half-hearted search didn't bring up anything. My DS7, grade-skipped to 2nd, has horrible handwriting. We have been admittedly lax lately in getting him to practice, for various reasons, but I'm wondering if anyone has a method that has worked well before we dive into this again.

I just made DS7 rewrite a paragraph he wrote because he did not leave any spaces between the words. And as he was rewriting, he still had trouble remembering to do this. It was a horrible session, full of frustration (both of us) and erasing.

Help! I know that next year, they will be starting to learn cursive, and I was hoping that we could just hold off. We have issues here with a kid who doesn't like to take instruction from his parents. His writing has always been pretty bad, even when he was with age-mates. Any ideas?

Thanks

My son's school tells the kids to use a "finger space" between words in early grades. The teachers have the kids put a finger after one word and begin the next word after the finger. It's a simple method that seems to work well.

A Popsicle stick works great too.

Cursive has turned out to be so much easier for dd. She says it is faster because she doesn't have to pick us her pencil between letters. It does seems faster for her - I think her perception here helps her speed.

If his handwriting is really much worse than agemates, I would suggest getting him evaluated for dysgraphia or other problems that could be interfering with his ability to get words down on the page smoothly with appropriate spacing. The fact that he had difficulty managing to do this even with reminders is a red flag for me.

Hi SPG!
Buy the Handwriting without Tears Print book.
Then sit with him for 5 minutes each school day and both of you do it.
Let him make the smiley faces under the 3 best letters you made and you make the smiley face under the 3 best letters he made.

If you want to save on postage - order "The Print Tool" and analyse your own printing just to get used to using it. And if DS wanders past and wants to know what you are up to, and try using the funny clear sheets to analyse family members handwriting, and maybe even his own, that's all good.

I know it can be alarming to see a paragraph without spaces between the words, but my kid's brain can be a bit 'stickly' at times, and at that age he was convinced that one should use the whole page, and didn't want to hear otherwise about margins or any such thing. Even when I showed him the red line on notebook paper and asked him what it was for.

Remember that the work you do with him may not show any effect for a few years - but he may well be able to leap ahead overnight a year or two from now. (Or he may be dyslexic - hard to know)

In the meanwhile - work on core muscle strength, arm strength, hand strength, finger strength - clay and crochet and washing the dishes and mud forts and painting miniature figurines - all the normal stuff that our computer kids miss. And start laying a foundation for touchtyping!!!

Love and More Love,
Grinity

ditto everything Aculady and Grinity say. An evaluation will give you important information/understanding of what is creating the barrier. HWOT is a great program and one of the interventions that the evaluator most likely will recommend.

You are wise to be concerned - poor handwriting can cause havoc in many seemingly unrelated areas - note taking/study skills, math. Accommodations may help, but it is important that your child develop some fluency. Sometimes there is just no getting around handwriting.

Thanks everybody for your comments. It seems like earlier this year, when he really tried hard, he could write very neatly. So many other things in life come up, that I forgot to do the daily writing. We'll get back on it, and check out the HWWT book.

Is dysgraphia something that the folks at the public school might check for if I ask? Or is that an outside eval sort of thing generally?

Dysgraphia and related disorders are things that the public school is required to check for if you ask - when you make your written request, ask that he be evaluated to see if he has a "disorder of written expression". This is the term used in the federal statute requiring the school to evaluate.

We have used a couple of different things with variable success with our DD (who also loathed, or still does, that is-- handwriting).

Handwriting without Tears is very good, and lots of people like it, but our DD did not.

When she was very young, we used Draw*Write*Now with her, and she seemed more tolerant of the handwriting practice because of the paired drawing exercises.

Eventually, we moved over to Italic Handwriting (the Getty and Dubay series) with her at about sixth grade, when the school's "D'Nealean" just plain didn't stick with her after regular instruction ceased in fifth grade.

Honestly, I think that the handwriting was probably just a victim of asynchronous development in her case.

Her handwriting is finally getting better (she's 11) now that she is needing to take notes in her high school classes. I'm ultimately glad we didn't force the issue too much, but part of that is her personality. The harder we push, the more she pushes BACK, so it would have been a no-win situation in short order if we'd tried.

We just had her do a few minutes a couple times a week when her writing deteriorated to a point of illegibility.

I may have her try working through the Getty and Dubay series again now that she is seeing a need for greater SPEED in note-taking. She's quite pragmatic about things like this, however, so unless she sees the NEED, she's unlikely to comply with any particular intervention. I don't know if that applies to anyone else, but I figured I would mention that just in case.

I personally have never achieved handwriting skills at a grade 2 level. The school forced me to work at it until grade 6, when they finally gave up. Did not affect my academic work in any other area.

Although I think it is good to attempt to work on a given person's weakness, some weaknesses may never be overcome. I feel it is good to work on it until signs of no further progress is seen. At this point, leave it alone for a while and try again. Sometimes it is a matter of waiting until the time is right. Other times, it may be a specific disability and nothing can be done. Just don't assume a weakness in one academic skill is any indication of weakness in others. Allow the child to continue to build on the strengths they show.

Everyone including the most gifted have weaknesses. Some weaknesses are just not as obvious or as much of a concern to society.

Thanks for all the additional advice. These different perspectives are very helpful. I should have said that part of this latest poor handwriting incident was my fault. The project involved describing something in words and picture, so I figured unlined paper would work so he could have the picture on the same page. (Although lined paper wouldn't have corrected the missing spaces between words...)

My plan is to chip away at this a bit every day. Anyone have success with particular paper/pencils?

Yes-- what your CHILD likes. LOL.

Seriously, DD loathed doing handwriting in pencil. She loves gel pens.

We also got her using "journal" composition books. These are bound composition books with primary ruled paper on the LOWER HALF of each page, and unlined paper above that.


Perfect for illustrated writing. Very motivating for kids that don't especially like writing, but DO like creative storytelling.

Thanks. I guess we'll just get a bunch of different things to try. I figured with all the mistakes, pens weren't quite the way to go yet, but maybe a gel roller would feel better and prevent some of the issues.

My DS really hates drawing too.... but that comp paper would have been good for yesterday's project!

JamieH - we don't focus on weaknesses much, at home or at school, but it's gotten to the point where no one can read what he's writing. He's doing great otherwise, and we just went through his recent report card with him and focused more on all the great things. (And asking why he can't bring home some of those "exceeds expectations" in behavior so we can see it too.) Then we brought up the ones in writing/spelling and said that's something that we can work on.

Really, the handwriting is his only "weakness," and in his new school setting, it is not holding him back from doing everything else. At the school he attended the first half of this year, he was prevented from subject acceleration in math because they viewed his handwriting as a problem.

Cray-pas are great for art for kids that skeeve out from crayons and markers.

Did I mention that he cannot stand to get anything on his skin? Cray-pas would set him over the edge!

I don't mean to hijack the discussion but I have a related question for all of you Handwriting Without Tears advocates. How do you know which level is appropriate for your kid? The ones I saw on Amazon were marked kindergarten, 1st, etc. Assuming that my DD is at one of these lower grade levels with her printing, how do I get her to "go back" to those levels. Has anyone just skipped the printing books and gone to the cursive ones? My DD definitely finds cursive to be easier than printing.

I don't think it will work for school but washable fat markers make the clearest straightest letters automatically. That's where we started. Now we're on to pencils and pens. Handwriting without tears book recommends and sells a little bag of golf pencils, saying they're more the right size for children. I just went and broke a few of our pencils in half and sharpened the nubs and told the boy those were his pencils. He can already get any of the pencils, pens, markers, crayons, paints or whatever, just those are 'specially his.

I forget when I learned cursive, but my mom keeps telling me she was surprised when we moved to NY they taught my sister cursive in first grade up there. I think it's a 3rd or 4th grade down here. So, your girl can learn it, but who knows if she'll be allowed to use it in school.
I bought the cursive one for who knows why to use with my boy. Oh, because he showed me some cursive in walmart in the school supplies and I asked him if he could read the letters, he said no. I told him those were still letters. He said he wanted to write like that. The HWT instructions are very clear and understandable.
The beginning of the book says it's even good for kids with sloppy printing to learn cursive properly rather than go back and learn print formally. That's what the salesman said in the preface.

I couldn't even read my own writing most of the time. If I slowed down enough, I could write clearly enough, although a bit wobbly. However, I had to slow down so much it was pretty much an unuable workaround. I learned to just put my effort into listening to the teachers and remembering as much as possible. Also learned to make short notes occasionally. The teachers never even noticed I was not taking notes most of the time.

Just wanted to let you know it caused me little harm in life in case this is a long term issue. I did very well academically in school even with this issue.

Good to hear the school isn't holding him back. This was my concern and why I mentioned my experience. It was rather annoying to be in later grades, being handed remedial writing practice lessons in front of the class. Only happened a few times, but I remember not liking it.

Go to the website and and scroll around - it's fairly helpful
We started with Can-Do Print
Price: $7.50 Code: DP Grade: Gr. 5

Can-Do Print is for fifth graders or older students who prefer print to cursive, but still need practice.
Download Sample Page

It's all the same stuff, but for Printing 'Can-Do' presents itself in a less 'babyish' manner, which was important for DS.

Enjoy,
Grinity

Well, we ordered the Handwriting Without Tears book. I'll post again when we've tried it out for awhile. Hope it works!

In the meantime, DS7 had a book report to do today. Since it wasn't for spelling, we decided we'd let him type it if he wanted. Much less stressful for the parents! He still complained about doing it, but that's another story. No crying, anyway! And he liked signing his name in a fancy font.

We too are having handwriting woes with my youngest It seems different this time around. Not sure what worked with DD9 will work with DD6. With my nine year old, I did find MyAccess to be helpful in terms of giving us a structure in which to practice essay writing. I also found a creative writing course over the holidays to be a wonderful way of focusing on story threads and making 'writing' seem much less like a chore and something more akin to painting a picture.

I've just discovered "The Word Spy" and "The Return of the Word Spy" which are really lovely grammar books. They're really quite complimentary with the maths we're doing at the moment ie., palindromes. The books are probably quite suitable for say 6-10 year olds (?)

I've found with DD6 - who isn't sure she wants help just yet - that giving her access to exactly the right type of pen and paper is really important. Some of the dotted line paper is just overwhelming for someone with poor perceptual positioning and she just can't work out where she's supposed to put her letters! So playing around with the basic tools of the trade can really help.

Hope you have some luck with HWT. Would love to get your feedback on this...

jojo