5 Questions Every School Must ask About Handwriting
How consistent is your school’s policy, and do you really have every base covered?
Handwriting is incredibly important for both young learners and older students. Its benefits are diverse, ranging from increased information retention to higher quality written content. As such, it is vital to encourage good habits early in children’s educational journeys to ensure that they become automatic as soon as possible.
The good news is that it’s easy to teach handwriting well by making sure you have a well-thought-out handwriting policy for your school. This will help you plan an effective programme, identifying those students who need extra help and giving parents the opportunity to be involved. You just need to ask the right questions.
1 | What script do we teach?
In the UK, each school chooses its own handwriting script, including guidance on letter formation, joining letters, and using capitals.
Choosing a handwriting script can often cause controversy, but the truth is that the choice of script itself is not terribly important since all scripts are a mixture of ovals and vertical movements. Most UK schools teach a simple script with exit strokes (flicks) after letters like a, d and i.
These exit strokes help to promote easy joining of the ‘natural’ joins between letters, where there is no change of direction (like a to c, or d to e). Some schools choose to teach a script with entry strokes as well as exit strokes, where each letter starts and finishes on the line. The important thing is that everyone in the school uses, and models, the same script. Consistency here is key, hence the importance of having a policy that every teachers knows.
When you teach letter formation, you want children to learn the correct movement to form the letter – not just how to make the letter look right. Right and left handed writers form some letters differently (crossing the t for instance), so it is important for your school’s handwriting policy to have illustrations of how the letters should be formed by both left and right-handed writers.
You also need to know which joins to teach and when. Most UK adults write a semi-joined script, which is efficient and might even aid spelling. Some schools aim for a fully joined script (joining letters like o and w), but children tend to drop these difficult joins in years 5 and 6. It is important therefore, for your school policy to clearly set out which joins you should teach and when.
2 | What do we teach in handwriting?
The first thing children should learn is correct letter formation. Fine motor activities like colouring, threading and stacking are a good start, but the best practice for learning letter formation is writing letters!
This involves short bursts of fun activity – doing big movements in the sandpit, using chalks on the playground, tracing letters in jelly, cornflour and hair gel. Handwriting is ‘language by hand’ and if you can turn those movements into habits, you are giving children a flying start.
As learners progress, a little practice every day helps establish good letter formation, letter orientation, sizing and even spacing of letters and words. Teachers need to schedule time for daily practice, taking care to observe children’s progress in hand movements as well as their writing.
It’s important to vary handwriting practice too. Switch between copying exercises (which is surprisingly demanding) and dictation, speed writing, or creative writing. Handwriting might not be the most exciting exercise for children, so try to teach it in short, varied, daily bursts.
As you move beyond simple letter formation training, remember to focus on efficiency and automaticity. A weekly ‘neat write’ exercise is a good experience for more advanced students, but remember that the end-goal is ultimately to produce efficient, automatic handwriting, and this is not always super-neat.
3 | What should they write with?
Giving children the right resources can make or break their experience of learning to write by hand. Therefore, it’s important to have a policy on what your pupils write with as well how they write.
Young writers should use everything from wax crayons, paintbrushes and fingers in the mud, to pencils, pens, crayons and felt tips. The more tools that children use, the better their writing habits will become.
It’s also good to have a school-wide policy on which kind of pencils and pens to use, taking into account design features that will help children develop skills as smoothly as possible.
Using triangular pencils and crayons promotes a tripod grip that helps children develop good hand control. However, children who struggle with grip might need their pencil to go through a foam ball, a piece of pipe lagging or a pencil grip to help train their hands.
When the time comes to move to pens, it’s best to avoid the cheapest options. Fibre-tipped handwriting pens have the all-important ratio of slip-to-friction that promotes control, meaning that it is worth making their use part of your school-wide handwriting policy.
4 | How do we assess handwriting?
An important part of your policy should focus on how you assess handwriting. An obvious place to start is that handwriting needs to be legible. But, more importantly, handwriting needs to be automatic, because if children cannot produce letters without cognitive attention, it stunts their ability to write fluently and efficiently.
You can choose to assess neatness by marking written work, but as previously mentioned, the much more important areas of handwriting proficiency are efficiency and automaticity.
5 | How do parents get involved?
Involving parents in handwriting is simple and extremely valuable. Often, parents are simply too nervous to help their children practise, for fear of teaching them incorrectly.
Parental input is a huge resource in a child’s handwriting journey, so providing resources and support to parents, to make handwriting practice easier at home can be a game-changer.
An easy way to do this is to make sure your school’s letter formation sheets are readily available on the school website, and to send out hard copies to parents every year.
Parents typically do a great job of five-minute homework tasks and these little bursts of activity can really help some writers. If children need a bit of a boost, getting parents involved in a short bursts of practice can make a real difference.
After all, with handwriting, little and often is the key. Practice tasks like sheets for ‘rainbow letters’ (tracing over giant letters in different colours) are easy to share, and allow parents to monitor their children’s handwriting carefully, encouraging good habits.
A handwriting policy is essential to get everyone in your school working off the same page. When it comes to both teaching methods and questions of assessment, it is really important that your school adopts a unified approach to unlock the range of benefits that handwriting skills have to offer.
Children who handwrite efficiently write better and learn more, so it’s well worth it.
Dr Jane Medwell is a leading academic in the field of handwriting and literacy and Director of Postgraduate Research at the University of Nottingham.
