This is a sponsored conversation between The Frugal Navy Wife and Go Teach! All opinions are my own.
Penmanship isn’t only important in high school, it's something that carries around with a person for the rest of their lives. As a homeschool family, I try to teach my kids how important handwriting is. Whether you need to work on your handwriting or your kids need more work on theirs, here are some tips for everyone!
Get a Good Grip
It all begins with a good grip. If your child doesn't have a good hold on their writing utensil, they likely won’t have good handwriting. This may be a bad habit to break if your child already has a poor grip, but it will be worthwhile to teach them now. Teaching them to keep a firm grip is also important, to keep the weight of the pencil from flopping around.
Use Lined Paper
Lined paper will help your letters and words stay in a straight line and they will help keep letters at the same height throughout your writing. There is nothing less attractive, in a piece of writing, then slanted sentences that start out large, and gradually get smaller. This is a great skill to teach your kids to help them have better handwriting.
Write in Cursive
When people are in a hurry to get things jotted down, often times it is illegible. This is generally from a lack of picking up the pencil and from running letters together. If most of your writing is done in quick time periods, it may be best to focus on cursive writing. It’s faster to write in cursive, then it is to write in print, because you don’t have to pick your pencil up as frequently.
Practice Daily
Practice, practice, practice! We’ve all heard it. Practice makes perfect. When you have spare time, whether it is during commercial breaks, or waiting for dinner to cook, grab out a tablet of paper, and pencil, and get to work. Have your child write a letter to a friend, simply practice the alphabet, or get creative and even start a short story. Even if it is for your eyes only! The more your child writes, the better their handwriting will get, as long as they take their time, and really try.
Geometrics for Older Kids
If you have an older kid try this trick. Have them make some geometric patterns on some graph paper something like this. (For this we used the Prismacolor Markers). We loved Being able to use different colors as we did more of this exercise!
Take it a step further and have them color in a pattern. Make sure they stay in the lines and color well. Some will color lightly some will make sure there is no white showing (that was me in school!) We used Prismacolor Color Pencils for this one! My son surprised me a found a 2nd tray of color pencils under the first one! So much for me paying attention! These colors are so bright though which makes these activities fun!
Now on to some activities for younger kids! We used the same color pencils above and did some basic pencil movements made fun by switching up colors.
Using the same color pencils we use graph paper to practice the basic handwriting movements. Take a look below. Make it fun and let them pick the colors, a new color per line if needed!
Next is one of my favorite activities because the big kid in me comes out! We use these Mr. Sketch SCENTED Gel Crayons. The scented part I love and the glide over paper like butter!
I take a different color and draw a shape. We practice colors and shapes, I draw the shapes first on the paper. Then we go over shapes and colors. I ahve them trace the shapes with their fingers.
We then use the black crayon and I ahve them trace the shapes. Make sure to have them take their time!
Then have them color the shapes in. In the picture below my daughter colored the shape in then wanted to use the white crayon and color it again, so she got twice the practice!
We have been using their techniques with my oldest and even after 4 kids they seems to be working pretty well. The biggest thing is to make sure to keep it fun!
What tips do you have to help imporve handwriting? Let me know in the comments below.