The Great Autahi Handwriting Challenge!

Last week, Tautoru's Blog post focussed on handwriting: click through this link to read it. It includes a handy overview of how handwriting develops as children progress through the school. 

Along with a number of local schools, we are participating in The Great New Zealand Handwriting Challenge. In all of our classrooms, you will find us engaged in quality handwriting practice for at least ten minutes a day. This is time well spent: being able to write comfortably, clearly and at pace is essential for so many areas of learning. There are also proven benefits to both reading and spelling from learning to write letters correctly and consistently.

It will be no surprise to learn that, in Autahi, we invest a lot of time in letter formation. Our students are in the process of learning and embedding phonics knowledge that will be the foundation of their literacy. As they learn letter names and sounds, they also learn how to write them. This is vital: neuroscience tells us that decoding (reading) and encoding (writing) are intimately connected in our brains, supporting each other.

Learning to hold a pencil correctly in a tripod grip can be a challenge. Using shaped pencil grips or three-sided pencils can be helpful.

Holding a writing implement correctly and controlling it to make accurate letter shapes takes a surprising amount of physical strength and coordination. Most of our writing is done at a desk, encouraging correct posture and book orientation. It takes core strength to sit and remain stable while writing. More than this, our children have to develop many small muscles in their hands to enable them to control a pencil and provide the right amount of weight to their pencil strokes (not too light and not too hard, either). 

We find that drawing is a great way to build writing stamina. But many children also benefit from writing with chalks outdoors, painting, manipulating Lego and puzzle pieces, using tweezers and threading beads. 

All of these activities recruit muscle strength and fine motor control. We have also seen some success in a 'big to small approach': encouraging students to make letter shapes on large paper or on our outdoor chalk boards. Then, gradually reducing the size bit by bit, to fit the page of a book as the child's motor control develops.

 

In an apparent return to a bygone age, we have recently begun to experiment with using small sticks of chalk and chalkboards for our beginner writers. This suggestion comes from Dr Helen Walls, one of the brains behind The Great New Zealand Handwriting Challenge.

The chalk can only be held with a tripod grip while the sensation of the chalk on the board gives more sensation and 'feedback' than a whiteboard or paper. This helps to embed the movements needed to make the shapes and also tells the writer if they are pressing too hard: the chalk will break.

As our writers begin to produce their letter shapes more smoothly, they progress practising handwriting in books. They refine the size, position and orientation of their letters. We learn letter shapes in groups according to similar movements: for example, c, a, d, g, s and e all use an 'open mouth' letter c shape. We use consistent language to describe the shapes and encourage children to say what they're doing as they write. An added benefit of this is that it gives us a common language (used school-wide) to talk about the moves and shapes we're using when forming our letters.

 

There is a lot to absorb here, but it is a gradual process. A little and often works best. And handwriting can be quite peaceful and mediative. It is often a little oasis of calm in our day that we all enjoy!

 

Finally, let's not lose sight of why we're putting in all this effort. Having beautiful handwriting is not an end in itself: our aim is to equip our students with the foundational skills needed to create and communicate with confidence. When children can form letters and words with ease and fluency, their writing can truly take flight.

Casey the Caterpillar and the fundamentals of writing

 This week we have been exploring letter shapes with some of our new learners in Autahi. Before we start writing amazing stories, we need to make sure that we practice the fundamentals of writing and one of those is the shapes that make up letters.

We do this by using a story called 'Casey the Caterpillar'.

 

In this story Casey hatches from an egg and starts to look for food to eat. On her journey she sees lots of different things around her.

As we can see here she has come across a tall stick. From this we can talk about how some letters have a tall stick like l, h, d and b. Then we practise the how we hold our pencil and write the shape.

Learning the shapes like this assists us when we are writing a letter. For example, an l is simply a tall stick but an h is a tall stick and a tunnel. This gives us a visual and audio clue to help us make the right shapes for the letters we want to write.

This is just one of the many fundamentals we teach but and it definitely makes a difference in our writing.

So don't be surprised if you hear us talking about open mouths, cups and possum tails when we are writing.

Learning to Write

We are writers in Autahi.  We all have something to say and ideas to share.  Sometimes though, it's hard to get our ideas down in the written form. If you think about it, in order to write a simple sentence--aside from coming up with the idea--you need to be able to access the sounds that those words make, know which letters makes those sounds, know what those letters look like and then be able to physically make those shapes with your pencil.  There are many skills that you need in order to write a simple sentence. 

We have been working on all of this.  For some of us this is brand new and holding a pencil is a foreign concept, while for others we are consolidating and correcting misconceptions about letters.  

We use Casey the Caterpillar in Autahi to learn about letter formation, letter-sound correspondence and directionality.

This is a cheat sheet for you to see the language we use to make the letter shapes.

This is an excerpt from the story that contextualises the shapes.  The open mouth refers to Casey when she hatches from her egg and is very hungry and ready to eat. 

Every day in Autahi we practise the sounds that the letters make using this song and visuals to guide us. 

We also practise the shapes on our whiteboards.  We draw a tree trunk and branches reminding us of our directionality and size. 

These letters all have tunnels in them.

These letters all have open mouths.

We used the sentence structure "I see a .." which had been in our poem all week and our new knowledge of letter shapes to write our own sentences.  Some of us had a go at the word we could see and some of us drew a picture to show what we could see. 

To support fine motor skills which are essential in writing and needed for simply holding our pencil correctly we have been having lots of challenges around the room.  Here are some of them.

Using small tweezers to sort slippery objects.

Threading buttons and beads onto strings.

Fitting small pegs into holes.

Clipping pegs onto boards.

As you can see writing is multifaceted and requires a number of skills before you can begin to write! 

We are very excited in Autahi to be on our journey strengthening our writing muscles! 

ABC groups

ABC groups

In the mornings we split up into ABC groups.  Some of us are working on our initial letter sounds and our letter formation using the story Casey the Caterpillar to help us learn the shapes of the letters.

       

This week we have been exploring letters that start with an open mouth.  We have looked at c, a, and o.  C is an open mouth, a is an open mouth, close it up, short stick and o is an open mouth and close it up.  We have also been learning the word can in our reading so we have been practising it in our writing as well. 

   

Here are some excerpts from Casey the Caterpillar and here is the cheat sheet of the way we describe the letter shapes in class.  You can use this at home too!

Others of us have been learning our digraphs.  This week we have been exploring Th and Wh. We use these songs to help us! We have been practising the formation of these digraphs as well as the sounds.  Th is tall stick, twig and tall stick tunnel.  Wh is four sloping sticks or cup, cup and tall stick tunnel. 

Stay tuned for some of our work around these digraphs and for now help me notice them in my reading!

Letter Formation and Early Writing

Learning our Letters and How to Write Them

In learning to read and write there are many components and sometimes one of the hardest parts for us when we're first learning is actually the mechanics of writing.  We focus on looking at identifying letters, the sounds they make and the shapes used to make up those letters so that we can hear a sound, know the letter and know how to actually make that letter.  

We practise this every day using our ABC song and the matching card to help us remember the names of the letters and the sounds they make.

We also use the story Casey the Caterpillar to teach the language and shapes around letter formation

Here is an example of how the letter c is called an open mouth and how we build on that shape to teach other letter shapes.

This is the cheat sheet so that you can be using the same language at home:

And here are some examples of our practise:

We start with shapes and we connect them.  Here we were working on the cup shape.  Cup, short stick.  Cup, possum tail.  Cup, cup.

The shapes for these letters are short stick, tunnel stop.  Short stick, tunnel and short stick, tunnel, tunnel. We also connect these to the sounds that the letter makes.

Then we move on to using our knowledge to write words:

Then we move on to having a go at writing the words we know:

There are many elements to learning to write.  We are working so hard in Autahi to grow our brains and practise all of these parts!