Is COVID-19 Impacting Your Child’s Handwriting Development?

It’s no secret that COVID-19 has negatively impacted our children’s education. Despite the valiant and exhaustive efforts of educators across the country, there are just some gaps that aren’t able to be filled through distance learning.

Unfortunately, for many of our young learners, handwriting is a part of the curriculum that is no longer fitting into the daily classroom routines. With decreased face-to-face time, and increased time demands on teachers and students, non-mandatory portions of the curriculum are no longer able to be made a priority. Some schools are resorting to simply assigning workbook pages, posting Youtube videos, and/or neglecting handwriting work altogether.

How does this impact your child’s handwriting development?
The most important thing to understand, is that there is a difference between drawing a letter and writing a letter.

For many young writers, they start out their handwriting journey by simply drawing a shape that looks similar to the letter they see. For example, a student who is trying to write a lowercase letter ‘a’ may draw a circle and a line. They’re using the skills they have (drawing shapes) to try and imitate a letter. This is very different from children who are able to distinctively and purposefully form the lowercase letter ‘a’ with proper formation and knowledge of what that letter represents.

Typically, as children progress through Pre-K, Kindergarten, and 1st grade they are provided with direct modeling, practice, and feedback on the proper way to write each and every letter. Through this work, they are able to begin the transition between “drawing” and “writing”, and therefore, grow into independent writers. Without this transition, many children get stuck in a series of bad “handwriting” habits.

These habits may present themselves as oversized letters, poor placement of letters within the lines, letter reversals, confusion of capital and lowercase letters, overlapping letters within words, or slow and laborious writing speed.

The good news is - most of these handwriting challenges can be avoided by providing our young learners with developmentally appropriate instruction on letter formation. Even for those kiddos who are already presenting with these challenges - it’s never too late to get back to the basics.

Click here to find out how we can help your child develop the building blocks they need to
be a confident and successful writer!