TR&W Issue 20

We need to rethink our priorities when it comes to teaching children how to write, say Christine Chen and Lindsay Pickton I n over 20 years of looking at children’s handwriting, we have seen a constant correlation between reluctant writers, or those who make slow progress, and non-fluent handwriting. We’re not talking here about tidiness: immaculate script can be non-fluent. The crucial factor is ease of movement – the flow from mind to page. Transcription ability is the filter through which ideas must pass; you can have the best ideas and vocabulary, but if you have a dodgy filter, you will produce poor writing. Stronger writers After the COVID lockdowns, we received many requests for support with writing stamina; to an extent, these have continued. Writing stamina results from multiple factors, but fluency of movement is key. When we The handwriting CRISIS push non-fluent children to write more, we are ensuring a discomforting experience while probably maximising practice of the incorrect movements – making them harder to correct in the future. Because so much of handwriting is motor-memory, the sooner good habits are formed, the better: it’s so much harder to teach good formation in upper KS2. Unfortunately, when a child is five, good formation isn’t always as legible as poorly formed but carefully -picked-out letters, and EYFS practitioners need to be able to read what’s written to assess a child’s encoded GPCs. There isn’t an easy solution to this problem, but we must always remember that when a child uses incorrect movements to form things that look like letters, In handwriting, fluency of movement is the priority, then neatness, with prettiness much later. Wildly messy handwriting is problematic – communication is the goal, and a child’s self-esteem as a writer often suffers if they feel humiliated by their script. But if a child is focusing on how lovely their writing looks (think unnecessarily swirly tails, or circles over ‘i’s) they can’t be thinking about content or sentence structure as much as they could – it’s a law of cognitive load. Rules for writing So, which handwriting schemes are the best? We prefer to stick to a list of key principles that should make any scheme work. Firstly, adults and children should all understand that the primary these will not spontaneously self-correct one day. Rather, because of frequency of practice, poor movement is likely to become ingrained. We need a shift in mindset, away from how nice writing looks, to a process of freeing up the thinking. The less a child has to think about their handwriting, the more of your amazing teaching will end up on the page. Another way of looking at this might be to consider that if more children have genuinely fluent handwriting, more of them will achieve greater depth in their writing. www.teachwire.net | 9 T E ACH I NG T E CHN I QUE S “The crucial factor is ease of movement – the flow from mind to page”