Helping Your Child with their Writing Skills

Helping your child with their writing skills

It is really important for parents to help their children develop writing skills from a young age. 

Being able to write full words takes a lot of practice and it doesn’t happen until a child is around five years old. Children must first develop their fine motor skills and learn how to hold a crayon and scribble.

To help your child develop their writing skills here are some tips from an independent school in Essex…

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Helping your child with their writing skills

Develop fine motor skills

Children need to develop their fine motor skills in order to be able to hold a pencil and use it correctly.

These art and craft activities are a perfect way to develop fine motor skills.

• Scribbling with crayons.
• Using a paintbrush will help to enhance hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity.
• Introduce your child to modelling clay or play dough to strengthen their muscles.
• Cutting with scissors.
• Playing with LEGO.

All these activities will help to build up your child’s hand and finger muscles. 

Learn letters

When learning letters it is good to start with the ones in your child’s name. You can help your child to learn these letters by simply pointing them out when you see them out and about. This could be on shop signs or street signs. Promoting reading in turn will encourage their writing skills.

With daily practice children will begin to recognise certain letters by themselves. You can then practice writing these letters with your child using a tracing activity – Simply write your child’s name on a piece of paper using a highlighter and then ask your child to trace on top of it using a crayon or pencil. 

Laminating sheets with their name written in dots is a handy way to keep practicing, tracing their name. They can use a white board marker pen and wipe the laminated paper using a cloth. Bath crayons are a great way to make learning letters and numbers fun, draw on the tiles and just wash off afterwards!

Daily practice

Your child will develop most of their writing skills at nursery and school; however you can give them a head start at home. Talk about writing with your child, practice writing and discuss the many ways it can be used. This will help your child to understand that writing is a valuable skill.

To encourage your child to practice you could include them in your writing activities, such as making a shopping list, tracing flashcards or writing messages to siblings. A great way to encourage your child with their writing skills is to post letters /post cards to friends and family. Our children love posting them at the end of the road and then receiving a reply back through our letterbox.