Handwriting can be like a fingerprint – unique to its owner and an expression of identity. How long does it take us as teachers, at the start of a new academic year, to become able to distinguish the child belonging to that unnamed piece of work? Probably just a couple of weeks - days even - before we can identify the offenders based on their handwriting alone. With handwriting being a piece of us on a page, often for others to see, it’s understandable that some people feel their handwriting is a representation of their self.
Why is handwriting important?
Handwriting is given emphasis in the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile and throughout the Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 English National Curriculum. It is a requirement in the TAFs at the end of each key stage. Expectations around letter formation precede statements about consistency and quality. By Year 6, children are expected to ‘Write legibly, fluently and with increasing speed’, and to make choices about their handwriting.
Yet, handwriting splits opinion in terms of its purpose in the digital age. While some would suggest that it is not a skill worth pursuing these days, there are times when all of us use our handwriting skills for one purpose or another, be it a beautifully crafted letter, a scrawled to-do list, or planning the content for your upcoming blog about handwriting. Recent research suggests that writing by hand, rather than typing on a device, activates the brain, helping us to both learn and remember more effectively. As the demands of the curriculum increase, having fluent handwriting will allow note taking, expression of increasingly complex ideas, and will support writing stamina too.
Once fluent handwriting is achieved, our cognitive capacity can be freed up to concentrate on the higher-level skills of writing rather than worrying about formation of letters and whether writing is legible. Expending all energies on thinking about the strokes and shapes that represent the sounds needed to write, leaves little room for coming up with something interesting to say. Furthermore, research suggests that practising words in fluent handwriting over-and-over can help to the brain to spell the word using muscle memory. With increased automaticity in spelling too, further cognitive load is freed up. In other words, we can focus on composition – and on achieving the purpose of our writing - when transcription is no longer a chore.
Foundations for handwriting
Children who have had plenty of opportunities to develop gross and fine motor skills through play and exploration in their early years, are more likely to have developed firm foundations for writing. Activities which have supported the children to develop their arm and shoulder strength, core strength and flexibility – such as rolling, climbing and skipping – will also prepare children for using tools such as pencils more confidently. Threading, stirring, doing up buttons, using spray bottles and making models with clay, will all help to further refine their fine motor skills. This variety of motion lays the foundation for the directional movements necessary for letter formation. Additionally, children require the ability to cross their midline – can they paint/draw a long horizontal line across a large piece of paper/on the floor/wall from their left to right or vice versa without swapping hands? Can they use one hand to roll a car along a track from their right to their left? If not, developing the ability to cross their midline will be key: try playing hand clapping games, kicking a ball, rotating the upper body, or creating big art with large circular motions. How about getting out the gymnastics ribbons to trace large shapes and letters in the air?
Some older children will benefit from revisiting gross and fine motor activities to strengthen the muscles and develop the dexterity required for writing. Once ready to put pen to paper, mark making and pre-writing shapes can continue to build children’s fine motor skills and develop hand strength and co-ordination, alongside a rich diet of ‘busy fingers’ style activities. There are many resources available to support with building fine motor skills with the basic shapes required for letter formation, such as this Handwriting Patterns Playbook from the National Handwriting Association.
How do I teach handwriting?
With gross and fine motor skills developed, children will be better prepared for the demands of accurate and consistent letter formation. While it can be tempting to teach handwriting along with phonics as children learn each GPC, teaching children groups of letters based on their formation makes mastering letter formations easier. These groups, often referred to as letter families, are given different names, including ‘push letters’ and ‘pull letters’, ‘curly caterpillar/ladder letters’. Whatever you choose to call them, it makes sense that if a child has mastered formation of the letter ‘l’, working on the letters ‘i’, ‘u’, ‘t’, ‘j’ and ‘y’ will be easier: each starts with a vertical, downwards stroke. The same goes for ‘the c team’: forming ‘c’ correctly will greatly support writing ‘a’, ‘d’, ‘g’, and so on. Each letter formation should be modelled and taught (you might like to use a mnemonic to help remember how it is formed) before being practised by pupils. Encouraging self-assessment can help here too: “I really like the way you have the body of this ‘p’ sitting on the line with the long descender below the line. Which one you do you like? Why?”
The National Handwriting Association sets out great guidance in their ‘Good Practice for Handwriting’ toolkit. This fabulous, free resource explores the 4 ‘P’ Checks: posture, pencil, paper, pressure and the 8 ‘S’ Factors: shape, space, size, sitting, stringing, slant, speed, style required for the process and product of handwriting. Understanding each of the 4 Ps and the 8 Ss of handwriting will allow direct teaching of each aspect, to support children in ‘getting it right’ to begin with. Our handwriting audit (which can be found at the end of this blog) can be used to identify barriers and plan support pupils who find handwriting challenging. Diagnostically assessing pupils, using the 4 Ps and 8 Ss, will allow you to assess these factors of handwriting, to get under the skin of the barriers which children are facing. Set a short writing task for your class and take time to monitor each child – how are they sitting? What is their pencil grip like? Support offered can then be tailored based on your analysis: when we identify the ‘tricky bit’, it is easier to make specific interventions to address and overcome the challenge.
Struggling with handwriting can cause great frustration over time. Some find it embarrassing. Someone brimming with ideas but unable to record them legibly may become disengaged with writing as a whole. While using technology to support these pupils can be beneficial, handwriting cannot simply be ignored with much of our education system still reliant on the handwritten form. In the ‘Improving Literacy in Key Stage 2’ report, the EEF acknowledge that “Extensive practice, supported by effective feedback, is required to develop fluent transcription skills” and recommends that we “Monitor pupils’ handwriting to ensure accurate letter formation habits, providing effective feedback to promote efficient and fluent handwriting.”
Strategies for supporting and improving handwriting in the classroom
Below are some suggested strategies for supporting children with their handwriting, shared by Michelle Nicholson.
1. ‘The Gold Standard’
Work with a child to identify a piece of work they are proud of in terms of handwriting and presentation (not handwriting practice). Photocopy the piece of work and stick it into the cover of the child’s book as a pull-out flap which the child can open up whenever they start a new piece of work. This is their own ‘gold standard’ below which they would not wish to drop. When the child feels that they can consistently match or improve on this standard they may choose a new ‘gold standard’ to replace the original piece of writing and use the new piece as their personal benchmark. This process is repeated through the year and avoids inconsistencies of presentation.
2. Small steps pathway
Support the child to improving letter by letter. It may feel as if this would take 26 weeks, but it really does have a snowball effect. Identify one or two letters that the child is consistently writing incorrectly either in terms of form, sizing or placement on the line. Model the letter formation explaining what you are looking out for, e.g. ‘the ascender for the h needs to be nice and tall rather than the same size of the n, so that we can tell the difference’. Then, the child practises with teacher and is given feedback. Challenge the child to start each piece of work with a row of these letters. Which ones are they proud of? Underline or circle them and then complete writing tasks with special attention to letters practised. Review writing and check letter formation of target letters- which need fixing, which ones match the expectation? Continue each week with a new letter, recording the previously addressed letters on a bookmark as a reminder for the child. The following week the child and teacher select another letter formation to work on, which again the child will self-monitor. Hopefully the previous week’s letter in embedded but they can check these from time to time to ensure old habits are not revisited. A book mark in the book could reference letters to check so far e.g. tall letters all have clear ascenders; lower case p sits with its body on the line and descender underneath; Letters c and s are correctly sized depending on whether they are upper or lower case etc. As the weeks go on, the worst letter formation will have been addressed and you may notice that the handwriting looks a lot better in general. Further individual attention on letters may not be needed at all, or could be addressed in groups e.g. ‘ensure descenders don’t loop down into the letters on the line below’.
3. Building stamina
If we’re honest, most of us will struggle to maintain beautiful handwriting over a sustained period of time, whether that be when given written feedback to the thirtieth book in the pile or taking notes for an hour. Children are no different. So this strategy is about building a fluid, neat handwriting over time and knowing when to use ‘publishing handwriting’ and when to use ‘everyday handwriting’. You may notice a mismatch between the script a pupil can produce in a handwriting practice book contrasted to writing a piece of independent narrative. That’s because when time and focus is given to handwriting, we can all give a concerted effort for a set period. Conversely, when we are juggling multiple disciplines within compositional as well as transcriptional skills, something will have to give. And that’s before we’ve even thought about the muscle strain caused by sustained control of handwriting. We need to consider whether we want quality of handwriting or quantity of content: we need to accept that we can’t always have both at first. Gradual stamina building is needed. Can the pupil give you one line of their ‘gold standard (possibly joined) handwriting today before they drop back to a more relaxed script? What about two great lines tomorrow? Can we aim for a short paragraph next week? Could the child choose a short section of a story or written activity that they would like to edit and publish in a polished form? This technique is particularly useful when you have children who can sustain a joined script when writing at speed- they can write in a joined hand for a while then revert to print if they find that easier or quicker until they have developed the skill.
4. Writing at speed
Linking to the above point, do you potentially need to introduce an element of writing at speed into handwriting practice? My own primary education equipped me with an enviable hand of italic script using the angled nib of a fountain pen. On entry to secondary school, I found that this skill was useless beyond writing captions or fancy labels- all the Y7 lessons required me to keep up with the geography teacher’s dictation or copy copious notes from a board. After a few weeks, my neatly joined handwriting descended into a chaotic scrawl. Set out the expectations for a lesson at the beginning e.g. ‘These notes are for you, so make sure you can read them at the end’ vs ‘This poem is going on display so do your best joined script today and take your time with presentation’.
5. A two-pronged approach
If children struggle with handwriting so much that it is a genuine barrier to their learning, take a two-pronged approach. Whilst some activities and lessons are dedicated to developing the skill of communicating in handwritten form, ensure others remove that barrier so the child can concentrate on the task at hand. Can the child use the speech to text function in word to dictate their ideas? Do you have any specific software such as Clicker that will allow them to compose a piece of writing without worrying about their transcription skills? Can you build the child’s typing skills? The final point again looks ahead to secondary and skills for life. In the past I have worked with children with literacy difficulties who have received a diagnosis recognising their learning needs sometimes only months before their GCSEs. Being allowed to type essays during an exam is only helpful if they are familiar with a qwerty keyboard, otherwise the extra time they are allowed is eaten up by painfully slow one-fingered typing.
Why not let us know your favourite strategies for supporting children with their handwriting? We’d love to see their progress so feel free to join our English Subject Leader VLE or share on Twitter @HertsEnglish.
Juliet McCullion
