Name: Thrive! NCHE Homeschool Conference
Start: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-05-24T23:59:59-05:00
Location: Winston-Salem, NC

Tagged: Letter formation

This topic has 15 replies, 12 voices, and was last updated 11 years, 2 months ago by Super23.

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March 2, 2014 at 1:11 am
Super23
Member
What are your opinions on the best way to teach my soon to be 5 year old to write? We’ve practiced letters, he does ok with some, but dreadful with others. I don’t know that he could do copywork, considering he can barely write. I looked at Hand Writing Without Tears. They had a HUGE $300 kit, but that’s just too expensive. Does he really need all that stuff? I’m looking for a program or I guess just an idea on what I should use to teach him to write.
March 2, 2014 at 1:32 am
suzukimom
Participant
I’ve used a variety of things…. 5 is young still….
I do italic… Penny Gardner has a very inexpensive reproduceable program for around $10 to $15 with matching videos on youtube. It covers basic italic and joined italic… I use Briem.net to get their italic font and joined italic program to join the font.
With my 3rd kit I’m usin ‘A New Handwriting’ by Mona Brooks that CM recommended… but I feel I know what I’m doing now.
If you don’t want italic, Peterson Directed is nice.
March 2, 2014 at 1:54 am
TailorMade
Participant
My boys always took quite a while to develop fine motor skills for handwriting. You might try having him make the letters with clay, “write” them in sand/shaving cream, etc. If you have a magnadoodle type write/erase toy, he can practice and erase without using lots of paper to keep costs down for a while.
March 2, 2014 at 2:10 am
curlywhirly
Participant
Both of my 5yos have some small motor issues so I was looking for a program that would help and support their ongoing (at that time) Occupational therapy. I got Handwriting W/O Tears but didnt get all the extras. I got the book for them to write the letters, the slates, the CD and thats it. I made the curved and straight shapes out of cardboard for them learn to build the letter shapes and make mat man. I used construction paper in a page protector for them to roll play dough and make the letters. The things I made were the types of activities I have been doing with preschoolers for as long as I can remember so it seemed silly to spend so much when it was easy to put together myself.
My kiddos have both graduated from OT now and my older 5yo can form her letters well and is learning her lower case letters as well. My younger 5yo son is working on it still, and making progress but he isnt very interested yet so we aren’t working on it very often yet.

March 2, 2014 at 2:26 am
Super23
Member
I think that’s it, he isn’t very interested in writing and he gets so incredibly frustrated when he doesn’t get it right. He can sort of write his name, but he’d much rather me do it for him. He does get super proud when he writes a letter correctly. I think maybe some of these ideas will make it more pleasant for him. I also really like the italics idea, but don’t they need to know the regular print and cursive? I guess I’m trying to “keep up” with what the public/private school kids are doing, I think I need to focus more on the quality of an education he’ll have in the long run and less with proving that we can do what they can do.
March 2, 2014 at 3:48 am
missceegee
Participant
I teach cursive from the beginning like it was once taught in schools. No reversals, no spacing issues. My 3 have lovely penmanship with the bonus of reading cursive without any trouble. I’ve used Cursive First and Pencil Pete and both have been very successful.
March 2, 2014 at 3:56 am
cdm2kk
Participant
I bought the handwriting without tears teacher’s guide and the workbook along with the slate. I perused the guide, but never truly used it. I did use the slate when first teaching a letter, but that is it. Writing with chalk is harder than pencil!! I used white board markers too. I really like the font of handwriting without tears in print and cursive worked great for my lefty daughter. If I had it to do all over again, I would get just the student’s book and I bought a pack of the paper, which is great for extra practice or copy work. My son learned in public school, but his penmanship was horrible and I decided to tweaked it and the improvement is amazing. My dauhgter’s print is still very bad, but I taught her cursive and that I can read!! I will eventually work on her print after she has cursive down.
hope this helps. I just had my kids do a page a day and it seemed to be just short enough to not overwhelm them, but progresses quickly enough to really show improvement by the year’s end. My son started in August this year and he is finished with the book and now we are using the paper to do some copy work.
March 2, 2014 at 4:23 am
Janell
Participant
One of my favorite ways to teach letter formation is to write on card stock a letter, phonogram, or word, depending on the skill level of the child, with a watercolor pencil and have the child trace my writing with a wet Q-tip. It becomes beautiful art and penmanship in one. Hope that helps. (I do teach cursive early too because it helps to eliminate most letter reversals.)
March 2, 2014 at 1:58 pm
Karen Smith
Moderator
Because he is only 5 and you mentioned that he isn’t interested and gets frustrated, he’s probably not ready to learn to write with paper and pencil. I would have him “write” in rice or sand occasionally, or put handwriting completely away for now until he has the fine motor skills needed for writing. I think it is better to delay handwriting than to push it on him now and risk destroying his love of learning.
March 2, 2014 at 2:32 pm
Bookworm
Participant
I second Karen here. Most little boys don’t LOVE handwriting, but it sounds to me like yours is just plain not ready yet. Do encourage him to color, draw, use his fingers to make and do things, and wait a while.
March 2, 2014 at 4:17 pm
missceegee
Participant
I agree that the gift of time may be in order. You can push and succeed and possibly ruin his attitude or wait and succeed and encourage his love of learning. When he’s ready, look into some of these ideas.
@janell – lovely idea
March 2, 2014 at 6:02 pm
Super23
Member
Sounds like a plan to me! I’ll just wait a while longer. He really doesn’t even like to color. He loves to be read to, but that’s about it. He still scribbles every time I ask him to color or draw anything. It’s the same with paint.
March 2, 2014 at 7:35 pm
Kayla
Participant
My daughter will be 5 in April. She has just started actually coloring pretty and not just scribbling. She still switches hands back and forth to color. I have just been encouraging coloring, painting, writing with pens (whic is way more fun than pencils for some reason). We are just working on developing fine motor skills. We just tried the water color pencil idea. She loved it! She will ask me how to write a letter occasionally and I take full advantage.
We actually get more precise coloring done when we go on nature walks. I bring a couple crayons and a sheet of white paper folded into a book, and I just ask her to draw some of the leaves she finds (crayons are great for doing rubbings) it slows us down on our walk and she pays closer attention.
March 2, 2014 at 7:43 pm
QuirkyMama
Participant
Sounds like my oldest son. He is a few weeks from seven now, but rarely draws or colors, though more now than he used to. My husband and I used to joke that he would have failed preschool because if given a coloring sheet he would scribble in one color just to be polite and be done with it. Handwriting was very, very slow going for him. We took a couple false starts to see if he was ready, and I gave up twice and waited. Another “practice” idea we used we called “trace erase”, where I would write a letter in dry erase and he would erase it in the same motion with his finger. He liked the game (and now my second son as well) to see if he could erase the whole letter without leaving any missing chunks in one pass. We eventually used SCM’s Delightful Handwriting and we loved it. I am not personally concerned with “perfect” handwriting, but I am insistent on “best effort”. So whatever the stroke or letter was, I would have him go until he gave his best effort for the day (and it looked pretty good too). I could usually tell when he gave a best effort, and sometimes it might be two letters, sometimes we just had to be done and wait until another day. We’ve now done the first copybook as well and that went well, but it was very slow. Now he wants to write his own stories. I don’t have time to transcribe them all for him, so he is really eager to write better and learn to spell so he doesn’t have to wait for me. I NEVER would have guessed he would be here two years ago. 🙂 ~Nicole
March 2, 2014 at 8:55 pm
MountainMamma
Participant
We are doing what some of the earlier posts mentioned…just using the workbook and teacher book for Hadwriting Without Tears. My husband made the mat man pieces out of thin plywood. I think you can make them out of cardboard or foam board too.
We have also found that doing all our practice work and copywriting on a white board works the best. My DS is a perfectionist and he loves that he can erase the letters until he gets them the way he wants. The HWT guide also says that writing on an easel or wall helps build the muscles needed to write. It’s working so far… DS has shown much more enthusiasm for writing. Lately, he even has enjoyed making signs and hanging them all over the house with no prompting from me. Fun to see them go from no interest in something to doing it on their own!