Teaching my eldest to handwrite

My eldest starts school in September and it’s something I have been prepping for years it seems, but now everything is falling into place there’s just one thing that is worrying me about them starting school.

They will thrive in school and forgive my parental bragging here for just a moment; but they are so brilliant, smart and hardworking, with a thirst to learn everything and anything. They can already read independently, know their times tables up to 12, but they can’t hold a pencil and are just uninterested in anything to do with mark-making, writing or drawing.

I have written (at a low estimate) dozens of ‘Learn to Write’ and ‘Handwriting’ type books over the years and I love sneaking in activities that help with fine motor skills into my books – I am all about hiding learning moments at every opportunity! I am familiar with the EYFS and KS1, so I know how key handwriting is to the early years in primary school.

There are a number of medical and physical reasons why my eldest struggles with handwriting, and maybe even personality traits. At one stage, while discussing this at nursery, I was told that the latest research indicates that the muscles in boys’ hands that control fine motor skills develop about 6 months later than in girls. (I skim read this paper about it, but seems to be not totally conclusive…) Anecdotally this makes sense to me as at a 4th birthday party a few weeks ago, I observed some girls of the same age sat colouring beautifully, completely in the lines, no gaps and very controlled, and some of the boys scribbling wildly and quickly often going off the page entirely and making marks on the table.

My eldest’s visual impairment plays a large part in their disinterest in writing, colouring and drawing because all three of these activities are inherently visual, and though this sounds like an obvious thing to state, it is something I keep reminding myself. My eldest is not a visual person, as a sense it doesn’t seem to hold much interest for them, which has given me a whole new perspective on the world and how much is centred and focussed on the majority of humans being inherently visual. So when they write it is not only a combination of all the things they find the most difficult, but the end result is something they aren’t very interested in anyway, or as happened a few times, their marks with crayons have not been thick enough, or contrasting enough or vibrant enough for them to see – so all the effort for nothing.

Also, when they find something difficult, they are very good at distracting attention away from that with something impressive they can do, and often attempts to practise fine motor skills end in them reciting their times tables, or performing the ‘Continents Song’ to me with perfect lyrics.

My hope with school is that they’ll see everyone else writing and it will be something they will focus and try at, because once they’ve hop over that fence, they work hard until they have mastered it.

As I always find as the parent of a SEN, disabled child, a task that if I were doing for my youngest would take mere minutes to do, can take hours or days of research – buying pencil case stuff to start has been no different. I can’t just pop into WHSmith and buy all the cool stationery stuff they like, I’ve had to research hand development, different shapes of pencils, I’ve looked at all the aids to help maintain grip position, I’ve thought in depth about how I want to buy felt tip pens rather than crayons as they are thicker and more vibrant.

If there’s anyone else whose little one is struggling with writing, these are the things I’ve bought and will be testing with my eldest over the next few weeks and months.

These pencils are specially-shaped, chunky and slightly shorter pencils - looking forward to see how they interact with these, I think these being shorter will work well since they have to get very close to the page to see, longer pencils can get in the way plus are a bit more difficult to control for them at the moment.
This company has lots of resources and thoughtful products to help kids learn how to write, so I am hopeful for these.

There are so many versions of these grip aids available, and some look incredibly complicated for them even to learn to use; like these, though I can see how they could help, I just couldn’t imagine how my eldest will figure out how to use these every time they pick up a pencil – seems like adding more for them to think about.
I decided on trying these first, as they can do a tripod grip and always try that first, but seems like their grip gets weaker after awhile, so hopefully the holes will help keep their fingers in position more easily.

I wanted to try some chunky triangle pencils, as they have used these successfully at nursery.

These look quite easy to use and thought that if the finger hole version was a bit much, these would help guide their grip into place.

Despite my worrying though, I do think that if there’s ever a time where handwriting isn’t such a big deal in society, it’s today – and I feel thankful all the time that they’ve been born at a time when technology can be used to make things more accessible, and the world itself adapts to help life be more accessible to all different people. They can already type out words on a keyboard or tablet, and they love finding new apps and what they can do, so we have those to explore as an outlet for them to express themselves in word. As ever with our eldest, it’s all about learning how they experience the world and supporting them to work around it.