6 Tips for Handwriting Success at Home

As your children begin to learn letter- and word-formation in school, they’ll likely have homework that focuses on this as well! Handwriting can be an extremely tricky task to master, which can make it even more aversive for your child to practice. Whether your child is just beginning to learn pre-writing lines or working on forming sentences and paragraphs, we have some helpful tips to promote handwriting success at home.

1. Wake Up The Upper Body And Core

Fine motor coordination starts at the core. When we have a strong core with postural stability, we have a greater capacity to control our shoulder girdle muscles. With more control over our shoulders, we increase our ability to control our arms, leading to increased mobility in the wrists, hands, and fingers.

Completing bear walks or wheel barrow walks, or doing yoga poses such as downward dog, upward facing dog, or plank provides great input through the hands, arms, and shoulders, as well as activates the core to prepare for handwriting.

2. Wake Up The Hands

Playing with playdoh, putty, or another tactile activity is a great way to “wake up the hands”. Sometimes, kids need to bring awareness to their hands and warm them up, just as you would do for your body at the gym before you exercise. Squeezing playdoh or putty activates the necessary muscles for handwriting. Additionally, if you are available to sit with your child, you can provide a quick hand and finger “massage” to help alert your child’s brain and stretch their hands before getting to work.  

3. Write On An Incline

Place writing paper on a slant board or a closed 3-ring binder. This helps support the hand and wrist in a proper position for writing. When our wrist is slightly extended and resting on the table or writing surface, it allows for greater mobility and manipulation with the hand and fingers, as well as increased control of the writing utensil which decreases shakiness when writing.

4. Tilt The Paper

If right-handed, slightly tilt the paper or slant board up to the right. If left-handed, slightly tilt the paper or board down to the right. When writing, it will likely feel more natural to tilt the paper a bit in order to line up with the angle of your hand.

Our elbows typically rest several inches away from our body, which means our arms naturally sit at about a 30-degree angle on a writing surface. By tilting the paper or slant board to match that angle, your child’s writing posture will feel comfortable and this should help them write with more fluidity and ease.

5. Increase Visual Awareness With A Highlighter

Often, the lines on notebook paper can be hard for kids to see while writing. Use a highlighter (preferably yellow) to highlight lines for increased visual awareness on the page. A bright yellow line is much easier to discriminate among all the other white lines, making it easier to write on and stay within the line.

6. Use Finger Spaces

Another visual issue that arises when writing sentences is that kids start to cram their words together, forgetting (or not understanding) how much space to provide in between. Use finger spaces: place a finger (or a thin popsicle stick) in between words as a visual to check that there is enough space between each word. This will help with spacing, and will also help your child slow down and pay attention to letter formation and alignment.

Writing Wrap-Up

Implementing these strategies at home prior to, and during, handwriting activities can be extremely helpful. Just as you stretch and warm up prior to exercising, your child should do the same before “exercising” their hands.

By bringing awareness to your child’s core, shoulders, and hands, facilitating an ergonomic writing environment, and providing strategies to help them visually focus, you will be setting your child up for handwriting success! 

If you are utilizing these strategies but continue to have concerns with your child’s handwriting, contact one of our pediatric occupational therapists at Chicago Pediatric Therapy & Wellness Center!  We can help your child learn some strategies to make hand writing fun and easy, with the use of their fine motor pro tips!  Our hand writing specialists can be reached at 773-687-9241!