The children continue to be exposed to regular practice in fine motor skills and in letter formation to ensure the development of good handwriting habits. Developing their fine motor skills is key to children becoming fluent, legible and competent practitioners of Victorian Modern Cursive handwriting style.
There are a number of factors that we discuss with the children when working with them to develop their handwriting skills: comfort and flexibility of the writing hand, pencil grip, posture and paper positioning. The children are developing their understanding that these things will all affect the way the letters are formed.
To begin, we introduced basic letter patterns – specifically the downward stroke, the hopping pattern and the wave pattern. Last week we moved on from this focus and introduced the i family of letters – which focuses on the downstroke. So far, the children have practised writing the letters l, t, i and j.
As is our practice, we have created authentic writing opportunities, embedded within our inquiry provocations, for the children to practise their writing skills. This includes adding words to picture story books the children have written; writing cards to family members and simple scientific labelling of animal drawings in our inquiry into spiders and dinosaurs.
We have also introduced reflective writing after provocations – as a way for children to reflect on the provocations they have been engaging in, while also having the opportunity to “have a go” at sounding out and writing words.
