Hello, and welcome to my blog.
For almost thirty-five years now, I have worked with students from ages 5 to 15. Many of these students have had one huge thing in common: the majority of these children have progressed through the formal handwriting instruction with relative ease. They were excited about learning to express themselves through writing and felt successful with the handwriting exercises as they were learning this new skill. At the end of the handwriting program parents and teachers pronounced each child a success and congratulated them on their accomplishment.
The natural next step was to ask the students to demonstrate their newly learned skill and each student was handed regular notebook paper. As the students sat down to write, they soon realized that notebook paper looked quite different from the paper used in the handwriting class assignments. Hmm…what should they do with this paper? Well, I guarantee that each and every one of them did their best to take what they had learned in handwriting class and apply it to the new assignment.
Too often, what we see next is a child whose handwriting is too large or too small to fit nicely on the wide-ruled lines. Or, when the student writes letters with descenders (or tails, as I call them) they all seem to touch the letters on the lines below. Now the letters all run together. What to do now?
And on it goes… tension builds, confusion creeps in, frustration takes hold… and heaven forbid if a teacher or parent should ask the child to rewrite the lesson to make it more readable. We have gone from a child who was successful in the formal writing instruction to one who is unsuccessful in transferring those skills to regular wide-ruled or (shudder!) college-ruled paper.
I decided to write this blog to share the things in the “Bag of Tricks” that I have collected over the last thirty-five years. I cannot tell you how often making the slightest, smallest change in the assignment or giving a helpful hint to the student has changed a student’s entire outlook on the assignment and success could once again be achieved. I’ll be sharing the eight typical mistakes I see on a daily basis and the techniques that have been successful in correcting them. I hope you will enjoy this blog, and take away some good ideas from it. I am hoping to add to this blog at least once every two weeks.
See you next time. Happy Writing!
Bobbie