How to improve your child's penmanship/hand writing skills

This first week of classes, one of the main things that I am focusing on is my children's handwriting. And as I tried to review and make an assessment of their writing exercises, there are a few things that I took note of, those that need to be corrected! :-)

One that is very common to many of them is that they have NO SENSE OF SPACE and UNABLE TO FOLLOW THE LINE. It’s always bigger, smaller, wider or narrower. Words were all continuously written side by side so whoever would want to read it might not be able to understand right away.

Another observation is that there are letters and numbers that were written inversely. The most common are letters S, J, K, B, D, P and numbers 7, 9, 6, 5 and 3.

inverted letter S

inverted number 7

inverted number 9

inverted number 3 and even the position of number 13 is incorrect

Others would write lightly or heavily to the point that the child's paper gets ripped. The children were also so used of having a lot of erasures, the work then when it reaches to teacher looks very untidy.

Now, there is really nothing to worry about if your child writes in any form such as what I have mentioned above. Those things ARE COMMON to children ages 4-6 years old. Most of the kids do not really understand what these letters and numbers are for. They simply know that it's interesting and that adults look at them all the time. What we simply need to do is to correct our children nicely.

As for my class, what I usually do is check their handwriting exercise right away and talk to the kids one by one the soonest time they submit their work. I mark their papers in front of them and tell them what they need take note of, which ones need correction and then ask the said child to repeat his/her work if needed. I also do letter-picture association if the child learns much faster visually. For example, to someone who would always write the letter "S" inversely, I would draw a snake on the board and ask the child to trace the shape using his/her finger. Then each time he/she would write letter S, he/she would remember the snake and how it looks like. Picture-Letter association is very effective!

Now it would also help if we will have some sort of exercises for our eyes. An EYE EXERCISE FOR BETTER VISUAL HEALTH! :-)

Try this one:

Can you find 10 differences in these two pictures?

How about this one:

Can you match the shapes on top to the exact same picture below?

Good visual descrimination helps us from getting confused. For example when we read the word "was" and "saw", we will know that it's totally different from each other even if they have the same letters. Puzzle games are good ways to help developed visual decrimination.

There are a lot of different exercises to improve our visual information processing skills like PERCEPTION, TRACKING, FOCUSING AND EYE TEAMING.
For more exercises, I would like to encourage you to visit this website below. The exercises they share are all FUN and I am sure your child will learn a lot.

http://www.eyecanlearn.com/#Memory

ENJOY!