Newsletter – April Showers – April 4, 2025

Your handwriting says a lot about you. It can be analyzed to see if it’s really yours or that of an imposter. If your handwriting is messy, you could be seen as a creative, free spirit or as a slob with no sense of pride. If your writing is tidy, you could be seen as taking pride in presenting polished work or as being excessively rigid. Your handwriting might even be observed to predict character traits such as your levels of optimism and trustworthiness! Crazy, right?

As a parent or teacher of younger kids, you may not think much about your children’s handwriting, but you should.

Often, by the time kids enter formal schooling, they have already formed habits using inefficient (and dare I say . . . messy) letter formations, and it can be difficult to break those habits.

Parents may notice messy handwriting and have their kids do their work again (because it’s so messy) or they may simply make a comment about the student’s poor workmanship.

Teachers might write, “Take your time,” or “Work neatly,” or “Do your best work,” on the tops of assignments, leaving kids who may or may not know exactly what that means feeling that their work wasn’t good enough, and in the end, no one is better for the effort.

But it doesn’t have to be that way!

You can help your kids to take pride in their work—whether you’re a parent or a teacher. You can teach your kids to break the bad habits that aren’t serving them!

The actual handwriting instruction is not difficult. It’s the breaking of poor habits that can be tricky; so if you begin teaching your kids proper letter formation early on, you’ll reap benefit over benefit.

Here are twelve reasons to teach your kids how to form their letters properly.

Twelve Reasons to Explicitly Teach Your Children Proper Letter Formations
1. Children who write neatly are seen as smarter than those who don’t. It’s not true, but people believe it’s true.
2. Kids are prouder of their work when it is pleasing to the eye.
3. When kids’ writing is not understood by their readers, those young writers can become frustrated and unable to see the point in putting forth the effort.
4. When in doubt about what a student is trying to say, teachers often mark written responses as wrong.
5. Kids should be equipped to put all their brainpower into conveying their ideas. When they are bogged down by inefficient handwriting skills (e.g., Is that a b or a d?), they are more inclined to produce poor, incomplete work.
6. Other conventions (e.g., punctuation, capitalization, spelling, etc.) are more readily adopted as working memory to focus on other tasks is freed up when letter formations are automatic.
7. Strong handwriting skills improve the quantity of work that can be done. While others become fatigued with the task of writing, kids equipped to fluently form the letters can persist for longer periods of time.
8. Teachers may promote less-effective techniques in the name of being age appropriate (e.g., circles and sticks to make a’s), but those techniques can lead to illegible handwriting when kids are in a hurry to get ideas onto a page, which is the most important part. (Is that an a or an o i?)
9. When kids learn to print the letters efficiently, transitioning into cursive writing is a relatively painless process.
10. Research indicates that, when kids manually write material, it’s processed and recalled by the brain more effectively and efficiently, but to use written notes, the writing must be legible.
11. Working on improving letter formations demonstrates to children that when they work hard, that hard work really pays off. It promotes a growth mindset.
12. If we don’t explicitly and effectively teach them the proper letter formations, kids must figure it out for themselves. It’s the process for forming the letters that’s most important, not what the letters look like.
Next week, you will be able to purchase our online handwriting workshop! We’ll share everything we use to equip our writers to use outstanding penmanship!

Here’s a link to our podcast about handwriting.