For the past few grading periods, I have been getting comments from the Spawn’s teachers that he needs to improve his handwriting. I have never really been strict about the neatness of his handwriting because I didn’t want to discourage him from writing at all by forcing him to do repetitive penmanship exercises.
I have also not been strict about his spelling mistakes for the same reason… I would rather he write and write to his hearts content and not let fear of misspelled words hinder his self-expression, so I encouraged him to simply sound out the words himself and write what he hears rather than constantly ask somebody what the spelling is for every other word.
But it has finally come to a point where I must begin to get more pro-active about it. His interest in writing is already established — he writes and draws in his journal about anything from what his favorite activity of the day was to what he remembers about his dreams at night, and he’s always writing me notes and letters at home — so I don’t think I should have any fears about him losing that just because I’m going to start “getting on his case” about his neatness and spelling accuracy.
But if I’m going to start making him do penmanship exercises at home, I want to make them as interesting as they could be for him. I read up on various techniques of teaching good penmanship like the Palmer Method. It’s a dated, militant practice of teaching good handwriting, but I like how it emphasizes proper movement technique as the basis for good writing practice rather than repeating copy for hours at a time. The Palmer Method, states that “the copy-book kills individuality and makes freedom of movement impossible.”
This philosophy goes quite well with what I believe about teaching children. Movement is connected to everything. Children who interact with their environment using all of their senses will better learn and retain new information and skills than kids who are made to simply memorize and repeat and go through the motions everyday.
So I am hoping to emphasize good technique over accuracy for our first few home-penmanship lessons and make them as enjoyable an experience as possible.
Good Handwriting Technique will be especially important in our lessons because the Spawn is left-handed and being a leftie is a whole different ball game than what righties go through. It is only now that I’m noticing how even just the way notebooks and composition books are constructed make it more difficult for lefties to write comfortably. I have to make sure that when I buy notebooks for the Spawn, I should avoid the Spiral-bound ones or try to find pads that are bound at the top.
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Lefties also have to angle their paper the opposite way from righties — this should have been an obvious fact but since I’m not a leftie myself, it just never occurred to me before. With that in mind, those beautiful old-fashion handwritings like what the Palmer Method or Spencerian Script teach would just be too impractical for the Spawn because it would require him to uniformly angle all his characters to a 58 degree angle.
Another key point I will have to remember in all these lessons in that in my right-handed world, writing with a system of “pulling” the letters from the left side of the paper to the right side comes very naturally and comfortably for me. Lefties, however, have to “push” their words across the page and are further hindered because if their page is not angled and placed in front of the properly, their writing hand will cover their work, making it that much more difficult to write a string of words.
I will have to watch out and remind him of bad habits that are unique to lefties like “hooking” his wrist over his words so he will be able to read his work while writing. This awkward position will further strain his arm and make his writing movements not flow freely as they should.
Here are some really helpful sites I have found to help keep me more mindful about how different the world can be for lefties:
http://www.lefthandedchildren.org/
http://handedness.org/
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