Learning to print letters and numbers is an easy task for children who have acquired the coordination and graphic abilities to produce and link the strokes that make up the letters. Over the course of the kindergarten (Gr R) year, children who are given the opportunity to do a lot of drawing will improve their ability to draw lines (strokes) that are smooth, and to link these strokes together to form shapes and patters that are well spaced and sized. How children acquire the ability to produce accurate pre-planned strokesĪt the beginning of the kindergarten year young children with good motor coordination and attention abilities will have acquired the ability to draw straight and curved lines (called strokes) to form a variety of shapes and patterns. Reliance on visual guidance inhibits learning the motor plan for the letter. Learning the motor plan for the letter occurs when the child is first given the opportunity to practice forming letters using smoothly executed movements which are not constrained by accuracy demands. Once the motor plan is well established and the child is able to link the strokes to form letters in a smooth manner without the need for visual guidance, attention can be given to writing accurately between lines.Īpproaches to teaching handwriting that use tracing letters and writing letters accurately between lines shifts the child's strategy for writing letters away from a fluent pre-planned actions using to using visually guided movements to write letters. An important aspect of this learning is the increasingly strong and automatic association between the sound of the letter (phoneme), the shape of the letter (grapheme) and the motor plan for the letter. Max's pirate ship includes all the strokes needed for handwriting letters, and his ability to evenly size and space the portholes and stick figures is quite remarkable.Ī stroke based approach to learning to print letters is a matter of building a library of motor plans for the different combinations of strokes that are used for producing letters and numbers, so that a letter, or series of letters to be preplanned and produced without need for visual guidance.
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January 2023
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