For You in the Snow Zone
This lesson helps with a child’s hold on writing tools. It requires that you find some tiny beads, such as little crystals to represent snow, and some cotton balls for snowballs.
Demonstrate holding a cotton ball in the palm of the hand while holding a pencil. The challenge to children is to hold the snowball in the hand throughout the lesson! The purpose? A relaxed hand has an open palm, and the cotton ball keeps the hand relaxed. Give each child a cotton ball to hold with a writing tool. Then put the tool down, keeping the cotton in place.
Children (or a child) picks up each bead with the index finger and thumb, then places it in the cloud at the top of the page. Then they can make it snow, bringing each bead down to the “grass;” that’s the green pattern. It helps to reinforce letter related movement to say, “down” each time “snowflakes” fall on the grass.
Without losing the cotton ball the children pick up a writing tool. Then they trace the green pattern while saying, “Down and up, down and up, down and up, down and.” Repeat and repeat… Put emphasis on the word, “down.” Children trace can trace, “Snowflakes sparkle.” or trace and copy on the next line, or just copy.
Better Handwriting in 2011!
This story on National Public Radio should give all who are working on their handwriting the rationale and incentive to continue, a reason for students to learn a legible and fluent hand and a reason for older persons to keep practicing: http://www.npr.org/2010/12/26/132263637/perfect-thank-you-notes-heartfelt-and-handwritten.
A great New Year’s resolution!
Please Look
I just had another look myself! http://66.147.242.192/~operinan/index.html Go to “Handwriting Repair.”
This relates to what I wrote about cursive in November, and tells about handwriting in such a clear and imaginative way. Briem is a valued mentor to me.
QUICK TIP For Pen/Pencil Hold
A relaxed hold needs an open palm.
For young children ask them to write with a cotton ball held in the palm with the ring and little fingers. The writing finger drives the pencil; the thumb and third finger stabilize it.
Older persons do the same but with a larger, soft ball. A ball of yarn; a soft, rubber ball; or a dampened piece of sponge will do well.
A TURKEY FOR THE USA THANKSGIVING
Pencil hold help and fun for young hands:
1) Give a child or children some corn. Use candy corn or the hard corn found at this season. You could even cut up tiny bits of orange paper and pretend it’s corn.
2) Children should pick up a piece of corn, holding it between index finger and thumb. Put it down. Close the eyes and pick it up. Repeat slowly, and think about where fingers are placed.
3) Hand out one or more turkey papers. Pick up a piece of corn. Feed corn to your turkey, placing it near his beak. Repeat.
4) The teacher or parent demonstrates a good hold for the child or children.
5) Add some feathers to the turkey that look like the pattern below. This is a good opportunity to use the non dominant hand to turn the paper.
As children write they should chant “gobble, gobble, gobble,” emphasizing the first syllable; it’s the downstroke! Say “Freeze.” If the writing tool hold is still good feed your turkey. Repeat.
6) Trace and copy the word, “turkey.”
7) Switch to crayons or markers and color. Hope the good holds HOLD!
Curious Cursive
Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting presents basic and cursive italic. The basic letters are essentially the same as the cursive ones. Once the basic letters are learned they move easily into cursive, but is it cursive as you understand cursive?
What does cursive really mean? There is a general misconception about cursive. News items often address the demise of cursive writing, but what exactly is the writing method under discussion?
To most people cursive relates to a method of writing where every letter within every word is joined. I call it “conventional cursive” because it is a method that has become familiar over the past 125 years or more.
True cursive writing actually refers to any handwriting that flows easily. Letters are joined or not according to the movement that is most natural to each individual hand, making cursive more rapid than a formal style. A formal style is carefully and precisely written, as in calligraphy.
Since the time humans discovered written communication they have probably written cursively. Very early examples are rare or non-existent.
Some cursive writing exists from Roman times when more people were literate. In museums you might see something that belonged to a soldier who inscribed a warning on his weapon of the evil that would befall a thief. Visit Roman ruins and you may see graffiti. These messages bear a faint resemblance to the formal capital inscriptions of the time. The writing lines flow freely. Throughout the history of writing you will find all sorts of cursive writing that derive from the formal writing methods of the time, one of which is italic.
Cursive italic has outlasted most other methods because of its ease of letter formation and readability. It was the method used for papal decrees, beginning in the 14th century. Its cursive variations spread throughout Italy and the western world. It was carried to the New World by the Spaniards, and I have seen italic writing in New Mexico from the 20th century.
Some current programs teach conventional cursive from the beginning. The assumption, probably correct, is that older students will “print” without instruction when required to do so. Legibility problems often occur with rapid writing. Joining every word in a multisyllabic word tends to pull letters off the baseline and distort their sizes and shapes.
Most schools that teach handwriting with any degree of commitment, teach a form of print-script first. Children establish habits of writing almost all strokes from top-to-bottom and left-to-right. Later, in second or third grade the habits must be undone and retrained for conventional cursive. Educators! What are they thinking? It is difficult to change fine motor habits of movement. The transition involves writing many strokes up from the baseline, and mastering letters that change shape entirely.
As science reveals more and more about how the rest of our body responds to the brain, perhaps the logic and role of fluent handwriting will become recognized.
Have You Seen This?
Often I hear that this series of videos is helpful to people who want to improve their handwriting. Please have a look. Hope it helps!
http://www.monkeysee.com/play/9112-how-to-improve-handwriting
Got Touch Screen?
What a great way to train fingers for handwriting! Many apps for touch screens encourage us to move around the screen with the index finger.
Sadly, the thumb dominates in much of our electronic world. It may well contribute to some really bad pencil holds. The thumb wraps around fingers and the palm is closed. The pencil is clenched in a fist-like hold.
There are lots of alphabet apps for young children, but choose wisely. If letters or numbers are shown, be sure stroke directions and sequences are included. Most important, they should comply with the characters that are in the program you use for handwriting instruction.
Then there are drawing apps that might help adults as well as children. It will usually come naturally to draw or write with the index finger on a screen, and the hand will probably be relaxed. A child will have fun if you show or demonstrate a letter or word, then let the child write it on a screen.
From The Link Magazine’s Homeschool Blog
People Judge the Quality of Your ideas by Your Handwriting
That is a quote from Dr. Steven James, professor of Education at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Dr. James is quoted in an extensive and very interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal by Gwendolyn Bounds, “How Handwriting Trains the Brain.” (To read the full article, see http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704631504575531932754922518.html)
Ms. Bounds’ recent article about the significance of handwriting will bolster the belief among homeschooling families that penmanship is an important part of a well-rounded education and of high value in one’s overall curriculum. One of the programs she references is Nan Barchowsky’s Swansbury handwriting products, which will be familiar to our readers. Nan has been a long-time advertiser and article contributor on the subject of handwriting. (http://www.bfhhandwriting.com/)
Here are a few salient quotes from Ms. Bounds’ article:
“Recent research illustrates how writing by hand engages the brain in learning. During one study at Indiana University published this year, researchers invited children to man a “spaceship,” actually an MRI machine using a specialized scan called “functional” MRI that spots neural activity in the brain. The kids were shown letters before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and “adult-like” than in those who had simply looked at letters.”
‘It seems there is something really important about manually manipulating and drawing out two-dimensional things we see all the time,’ says Karin Harman James, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Indiana University who led the study. . . “
. . . Other research highlights the hand’s unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas. Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says handwriting differs from typing because it requires executing sequential strokes to form a letter, whereas keyboarding involves selecting a whole letter by touching a key.
She says pictures of the brain have illustrated that sequential finger movements activated massive regions involved in thinking, language and working memory—the system for temporarily storing and managing information.
And one recent study of hers demonstrated that in grades two, four and six, children wrote more words, faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand versus with a keyboard.
In high schools, where laptops are increasingly used, handwriting still matters. In the essay section of SAT college-entrance exams, scorers unable to read a student’s writing can assign that portion an “illegible” score of 0.
Back to Dr. Steve Graham: “Even legible handwriting that’s messy can have its own ramifications”, he says and cites several studies indicating that good handwriting can take a generic classroom test score from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile, while bad penmanship could tank it to the 16th. “There is a reader effect that is insidious,” Dr. Graham says. “People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting.”
HOLD—NOT GRIP
Hold is good. Grip is bad. Those great little helpers that go on pencils are called pencil grips. “Grip” makes me think clench the pencil tightly, and that’s the last thing we want to encourage. How we hold any tool affects the success of its use. We may concentrate intently on an action, but our muscles must be relaxed for success, whether we throw a ball, hammer a nail, touch a bow to a violin, or put pen to paper.
So hold your pen or pencil .