Saturday, November 28, 2009

Form is so important.

I started working at a learning center on Saturdays. I'm so happy for the job although I'm my usual cautious, skeptical self.  I don't want to get too excited but this is a great way to keep myself in the education sector.  To keep my feet wet, so to speak.

Last Saturday, I had a rather unpleasant interaction with a student, one of the very few students of color at the center.  He was rude and sarcastic and I had to ask him why he was being that way.  The boy is in fifth grade and his parents have him there to work on his handwriting and his reading. The boy seems very bright--I don't actually think he needs any extra help with the reading. His handwriting is legible but not neat. You could chalk it up to him being a boy (boys seem to be less precise with their handwriting though not always). But what I see (and I'm not sure why the teachers haven't noticed) is that the boy holds his pencil incorrectly.

There might not be one wholly correct way to hold a pencil. There may be some slight differences here and there but generally, the pencil should point towards you as you're writing. This student I'm talking about holds his pencil pointing away from him and looks like he is wrestling to write. There are pages and pages of manuscript handwriting worksheets that he has been doing and the writing stays the same. I'm positive that a change in his pencil posture would improve things.

I am now insisting that Z1 improve his pencil posture. I hadn't been emphasizing it before mainly because I didn't realize how important it was. It's annoying to him but I know that it will vastly improve his penmanship. Form is so important. As a crocheter/knitter, holding your implements correctly is the difference between neat work with even stitches and sloppy, uneven work. The same applies to handwriting.

So I pulled out the D'Nealian Handwriting workbook and two or three times a week, we sit down with it and practice. I'm not so interested in anything other than he knows how to hold the pencil and how to manipulate the pencil holding it correctly. I know that as he gets older, his fine motor skills will continue to improve and he will be able to control the pencil.


I haven't given up on sharpening his fine motor skills. Just today, Z1 requested that we make snowflakes. It didn't occur to me until I actually looked up snowflake templates that this is a great way for him to practice using a pair of scissors. As with a pencil, the way you hold it makes all the difference in the results you get. For Z1, cutting out the snowflakes was an excellent way to teach this lesson. When he was holding the scissor the wrong way, he couldn't get any kind of real cutting done. Holding them correctly, he was able to cut out with much more ease. I love a hands-on lesson. I know what he learned will carry over to the handwriting too.