As today is National Handwriting Day, I thought it might be suitable to share a couple of the ways that we’re working on handwriting skills.
Handwriting is not something that’s been easy for Penguin, and it still isn’t. He’s had to work quite hard on developing his fine motor skills, and there was also a period of regression at one point.
As I’ve mentioned before, using exercises based around something that a person already has a keen interest in, is generally great for motivation. In Penguin’s case, these interests can be subjects such as animals or letters of the alphabet, or sensory preferences, such as water, sand, playdough etc. But perhaps the richest source of material for building learning activities around, are his favourite characters from tv shows and books.
Here are two simple examples relating to handwriting:
1. Homemade colouring pages
Years ago, my husband had the simple but brilliant idea of putting a blank paper up against the tv screen, where Penguin had paused a favourite sceen from a tv show he liked, and trace the outlines of a beloved character. Penguin then started asking us to do that with various pictures. He’d pause a dvd and get a pen and paper, and come and pull one of us to the screen.
More recently, we’ve started using that idea for making our own colouring pages. Colouring is a great way to practise those fine motor skills needed for handwriting, and if you chose to use very short (broken) crayons, it’s also a fantastic way to work on a decent pencil grasp!
On the picture above, Penguin is colouring in a bottle which the farmer in Shaun the Sheep produced when practising magic tricks… 🎩✨
2. Copying words or phrases from a favourite scene (or song, story, etc.)
In this example, pictured above, I’ve made a page showing Spencer from Balamory and his tubs of paints. Penguin isn’t actually a massive Balamory fan, but there are certain scenes that have really caught his attention. One of them features Spencer gathering up little tubs of paint while naming the colours: “Canary Yellow! … Sunburst Red, beautiful!” and so on. The colours I’ve included on this activity page are the same as in that scene, and as Penguin takes the labels off the velcro at the bottom, to place each on their matching tub, I call out the names the same way as Spencer does, which keeps Penguin interested. He also tries to fill in some of the words, which is brilliant considering that he’s nearly non-verbal.
Next follows the actual handwriting, with Penguin writing the names of the colours on each tub. We use an erasable pen, which can be easily wiped off the laminated page with a tissue. The letter “e” is a particularly tricky one for us, as you can see in the first picture above. But the stage we’re at now is a clear improvement on a couple of months ago, which in turn was already better than a few months before that. And as they say, it’s not how quickly you’re moving forward that matters most, but that you keep going. And as long as we stay motivated, we do!
Another thing we do a lot of, which helps developing hand strength and fine motor skills, is playdough. Here’s one of our recent playdough activities: Four Seasons Playdough Mats
And if you love Shaun the Sheep, just like us, you might like to work on motor skills and hand-eye coordination by making a pom-pom sheep