Strong foundational skills

The three-part resource comprehensively mobilizes research to explain the “how and why” of teaching cursive handwriting.

It introduces cursive handwriting instruction and includes specific lessons to use with children, from “pre-printing” activities (like colouring, tracing and connecting dots) to lined sheets demonstrating script and letter spacing. Resources are accessible with rich use of photos, illustrations of children’s work, easy layout and design.

The resource combines theory and practice to help teachers or parents instruct children in developmentally progressive ways, beginning with setting in place strong foundational skills.

At school, the focus is:

In kindergarten:

• on fine motor manipulative and fine motor literacy skills supported by hands-on, play-based learning and direct instruction;

• shape recognition;

• “path of movement” work (referring to the direction of letter strokes, to ultimately build habits that will allow children later to join letters);

• and letter tracing, copying and printing from memory.

Children must be able to reconstruct internal mental models of letters seen on a page, and then with fine motor control, reproduce letters onto a page.

When a child can print their name at the size of about three-quarters of an inch, this is a key indicator the child has developed basic print concepts. This means they understand print is a representational system of mapping sounds to letters. They are in early stages of recognizing this through letters in their name, and so they learn to generalize to the entire alphabet. Shape recognition is really important here too, usually in early kindergarten.

By the end of kindergarten, young learners should be able to print most of the lower and upper case letters. This involves enormous amounts of tactile experiences with letter shapes, games and activities for developing a good pincer grip, using the tools of literacy (crayons, pencils) in developing control over fine motor skills such as drawing, colouring and “staying between the lines” tasks.

A play-based approach that is engaging and fun for young children is important in motivating and creating a sense of confidence and agency in these early, emergent moments of written literacy learning. Training the muscle memory in these skills so they eventually come automatically are the keys to the next step in literacy development.

Grade 1

Direct instruction in handwriting begins in Grade 1 with short, consistent lessons of 20 minutes, with another 40 minutes of practice opportunities during the day. Making labels, greeting cards, thank you notes, crafts and lists reinforce these foundational skills.

Handwriting should be legible at the end of Grade 1.

Grade 2

Grade 2 represents a transition point where the joins or ligatures are introduced. Again, this involves movement and patterning exercises for developing the muscle memory for connecting letters beginning with the diagonal move such as ai, an.

Making connections and minimizing the number of “lift offs” (where pencil must lift from the page) facilitates developing speed, thus opening precious working memory space for other demands of generating text such as retrieving and mobilizing precise and nuanced vocabulary choices. Young learners continue to work on letter shape and size.

Grade 3

Grade 3 consolidates these foundational skills by making increased numbers of connections and control over shape, size, space and slant of handwriting — with indicators of speed or fluency of hand.

It becomes clear that developing fluent handwriting imposes many competing demands on young learners. Early, direct, programmatic, developmentally progressive, sustained instruction with ample practice opportunities throughout the school day can go a long way toward realizing better handwriting outcomes among our young learners and in turn, better academic outcomes.

Good instruction and resource support are key to achieving this success.