Wow. I’ve seen these photos a million times, but I still love to stop and admire this kiddo’s hard work from time to time. It’s one of those progress pictures that just leaves you feeling so inspired and motivated.

This sweet kiddo was the perfect example of a student who was succeeding academically, but was having a bit of trouble in the handwriting department. He had all the ideas, but just needed a bit of support in building up the skills necessary to legibly get those ideas down onto paper. Because of these challenges, he was under the impression that he wasn’t a “good writer” and writing had become a constant battle. Over the course of the summer, we were able to not only unleash his ability to form beautiful letters, but we were able to begin a mindset change in regards to writing in general.

Keep reading to find out how I helped this student transform his handwriting skills in only 8 weeks.

Step 1: Evaluation

The first step to any successful handwriting intervention is a thorough assessment. For this student, I used the Handwriting Without Tears: Print Tool. This assessment tool allowed me to evaluate the student’s ability to form letters with proper sequence and orientation, measure placement of letters on the baseline, measure spacing, and gather quantitative information on which components of handwriting were causing the greatest challenge.

If you are looking for a low-cost quality handwriting assessment - stay tuned! We have a quick, easy, & effective handwriting assessment tool coming soon!

The results of this evaluation indicated the following major handwriting challenges for this student:

1. Letter Formation
Throughout this assessment it became clear that this student was forming approximately 50% of letters from the top, and the rest were starting at various spots along the letter pathway. Additionally, many of his letters consisted of various “shapes” (ex. Letter ‘r’ was 2 small intersecting lines), but were not being formed as meaningful letters. For this student, inconsistent starting points & formation of his letters was significantly impacting his overall handwriting legibility and was causing his writing to look more like “approximations” as opposed to letters. 

2. Placement of Letters on the Baseline
In my opinion, placement of letters on the baseline is one of the most important and underrated components of handwriting. This skill is simple - does the child form the letter by touching it to the bottom line? For this student, he was only placing letters on the baseline with about 25% accuracy. This causes the appearance of “floating” letters which often get lost on the page. 

3. Letter Sizing
Letter sizing goes hand-in-hand with placement of letters on the baseline. To put it simply, letters can be 1 of 3 sizes: tall, small, or “diving”. For this student, letter sizing was a major component of his overall handwriting neatness. The lack of differentiation in letter sizing, mixed with a lack of placing letters on the baseline, caused his handwriting to appear messy and illegible - even though the content was amazing!

4. Spacing
The final component that I found to be impacting this child’s handwriting legibility was spacing. There are two components to spacing: spacing within words, and spacing between words. This student had a pretty solid handle on proper spacing within words, but inconsistent spacing between words was causing his handwriting to be challenging to decipher. 

Step 2: Intervention

After completing my initial evaluation, it was time to create our intervention plan! Going into this, I knew that we were on a tight timeline, and all of our handwriting goals had to be accomplished before the end of summer vacation. With that in mind, I created an ambitious plan that would power us through 8 weeks of handwriting “bootcamp”. 

The thing that I always address first - for every single handwriting student - is letter formation. In my experience, taking the time to properly demonstrate, practice, and reinforce proper letter starting point & formation is extremely impactful on overall skill carryover and retention. For this student, since our time together was so short, I decided to address letter formation, sizing, and placement on the baseline all-in-one. 

With this student, I primarily utilized the Handwriting Without Tears: Double-Lined Chalkboard. Through the use of this tool, we were able to practice proper starting place, formation, placement, & sizing all within one exercise. We followed the Handwriting Without Tears “wet-dry-try” approach to this tool to provide opportunities for repetition and direct practice.

We utilized this consistent approach to handwriting as we worked through the capital alphabet, and then again as we worked our way through the lowercase alphabet. I was careful to group letters based on formation patterns to allow us to cover more letters per-session. For example, we grouped together lowercase letters r,n,m into one session since they all follow the same formation pattern.

The final skill that we addressed during our time together was word spacing. For this student, addressing word spacing was as simple as developing the habit. We did this by writing silly sentences and stories together - using either a finger or popsicle stick as visual reminders to put spaces between words. 

After only 8 weeks of following this program - this student was beyond ready to take on first grade! 

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