WRITING FOR WINNERS: 7 WAYS TO MAKE HANDWRITING NOT-SO-SCARY Do you think your child’s handwriting may have room for improvement? Beefing up handwriting skills can help your child turn those illegible notes into precise penmanship. It can also help a teacher to understand a student’s message. “When a child has difficulty with handwriting, academic performance suffers and self-esteem plummets,” says Lisa Marnell, director of Mass.-based Duxbury Occupational Therapy Services and founder of Handwriting Help For Kids, www.handwritinghelpforkids.com. “After all, writing should be joyful discovery not painful drudgery.” Below are several questions to ask and tips on how to improve illegible handwriting. Helping your child improve his script may send him on his way to becoming an academic success! Is he using a sharp pencil or a good pen? A bad writing utensil can damage anyone’s handwriting. Keep plenty of pencil sharpeners or mechanical pencils around along with pens that have free-flowing ink. Is she sitting up straight? Good posture can greatly improve letter shape and consistency. Keeping feet flat on the floor and approximately shoulder width apart helps, too. How is your child holding the pencil? Ideally, the pencil should be held at a 60-degree angle, with a three finger grip, two to three centimeters from the tip. If it seems she still is having trouble, it may be that the pencil is too slick. Try using grips that slip over the pencil itself. Is the slant of her letters too far left or right? This can make reading her writing impossible without having to turn the paper. Try having her write with the paper slanted slightly to the left or right, depending on which hand she writes with, so that it follows the natural arc of the hand. Can you distinguish between capital and small letters? If not, this is something you should call to your child’s attention, as it can be remedied by simply changing the size of her letters. Is your child writing too big? Or maybe she’s writing too small? Either way, it is important that your child find a “writing size” that feels natural to her but that is readable and doesn’t take up too much space on the page. Practice on unlined paper with finger paints or chalk. When your child becomes comfortable with forming her letters in a reasonable size, change to lined paper so that she can practice staying within the lines. Practice makes perfect! Try to incorporate practice into everyday activities. Ask your child to help write the weekly grocery list, or plan an outing and have her make a list of things you may need, suggests Marnell. “You can help her by writing the lists out one at a time and then ask her to copy each as neatly as she can,” she says. By Kara Murphy