To left handlers or mums of left handlers

[Sugarbeach]

Dd (7yo) is a left hander in a family of right handers. We are thinking about learning to play the guitar, and also how to knit and crochet.....and I'm feeling a bit clueless about how she should learn.....i can knit and crochet but i cannot get my head round how to teach her the opposite handed.

Should she learn crochet and knitting right handed? Or left handed? Does she need a left handed guitar or can she learn right handed? based on your experience, which is better? does it make a difference? TIA!!

Being Left handed is NOT a disability. Please do not treat it as ANYTHING special.

DH and I are both Left handed, as were both my parents.
Lo and behold we have two right handed children (who keep moving the mouse to the WRONG side of the keyboard FWIW!)

How did they learn to write and cut and all that?
Easy. We showed them the way we did it.
They copied us as they felt comfortable.
End of.
No great shakes.

DP is left handed and learned to play guitar right-handed as a kid.

I bought her a left handed guitar for Christmas one year as she had expressed an interest in playing again. She couldn't get to grips with it at all. It went on eBay.

I've never thought of being left handed as a disability, in fact it's always given me the edge in sport, but it does make life different. I am regularly aware that I do things differently to my right handed colleagues and my family. I "tick" in the opposite direction, I hold my knife in my left hand and I struggle with right handed scissors. For me it is SOMETHING different, but NOT a disability :)

There are left handed crochet tutorials on YouTube. I expect there are similar knitting ones. I learned to knit by sitting next to my gran - so adjacent arms are doing the same thing.

Wrt writing, I angle the paper and write from top lefthand corner of the desk to bottom right. And I agree with other posters, many worksheets are a pita for lefties :)

DH is left handed and although he writes left handed he plays guitar and sport right handed because that is how he was taught at school. DS2 is left handed and hasn't had any problems so far, except he gets very frustrated when he does a drawing or writes something and then his left hand smudges it all - I'm dreading the introduction of ink pens this year (year 4)!

It really depends on each person. With the guitar (or anything), make sure she tries both ways to find out which one comes more naturally. Yes, she might copy the right handed guitar playing but it could limit her skill level severely. This happened to me when i learned the guitar - I just copied my teacher without questioning it and only years later realised i should have tried the other way round. I never really got the hang of it. The reason I realised was that years later at uni, at a party we were eating with chopsticks and i was useless, for years I had tried here and there and just couldn't do it unlike my friends. Until suddenly one friend said "but you are left-handed, why are you holding the chopsticks with your right hand?". Sure enough, when I tried with my left hand, I could eat with chopsticks perfectly right away.

If you're 100% leftie this may not happen, but I'm like others here, play tennis, kick a ball and carry stuff with my right (so anything involving strength), but I need the left hand for fine motor skills (sewing, drawing, writing).

So nobody here can give you the answer, let her try both sides and see which one is easier.

I don't know anything anything about the guitar but for knitting and crocheting there are leftie instructions online.

I learned to knit left handed in order to show DD4 who is the only leftie in a family of righties. She can do hardly anything with her right hand.

Writing is hard -- the instinct is to move the pen away from the body and lefties can't do this. However, after plenty of practice her writing is legible, and her cursive suddenly became neat at just the same point as everyone else's did (around age 8.5). There is a surprising number of lefties in her class for some reason, and because of that the teachers have been forced to adapt. I really recommend pointing out issues to teachers. It is often a simple thing to adapt worksheets, spelling lists, etc., for a leftie.

I got a cordless mouse a good while ago and now everyone is happy.

Nulliou -- 'I developed a bizarre ambidextrous style for tennis as a kid. I swapped hands between shots, playing shots in either my left or right hand on the forehand instead of using backhands.'

I had a great grand uncle who was a professor of moral theology at a Jesuit seminary. He was incredibly tall and had long arms and this was his tennis strategy too. He would just stand at the net (playing in his old fashioned cassock) and volley everything.

that's 'Nullius' (not what I said)

I am left handed but can use right handed scissors, there is a knack to it which I learnt through trial and error. I never did work out how to knit though, I tried both ways but it always felt odd.

When I was at school I was a fencer, and being left handed was an advantage as right handers didn't know what to do with you.

I would just get her to try both ways. Some things will feel comfortable left handed and some might be better right handed. As someone else said, it might depend on the extent of your DD's one-handedness. I am quite ambi-lateral, so use both sides all the time but for different things...write with left, play pool with left but racket sports and bowling, play with right.
I have just started to have a go at knitting and so far right-handed is fine.

TalkinPeace: "Being Left handed is NOT a disability. Please do not treat it as ANYTHING special."

I had to chuckle when I read that. I am a leftie and honestly, you just get on with it. It is soooo common in UK but for some reason much less so in Singapore where I grew up. My dh thinks I am a freak though for being the only lefthander in the house.

me and dd are lefties we both write with the left, both use the right for tennis, hockey, guitar.

It depends how comfy she finds it, she will naturally go for one or the other. teaching could be a problem with knitting, but i felt comfortable being taught the right handed way She just needs to 'feel' it's right i guess.

I've never found being left handed a problem and 2 of our children just seem to get on with it. We don't write with a hooked hand, holding the pen/pencil as a right handed person would. The table is laid normally and we eat with the knife in our right hands. We use scissors, no problems, I taught myself to knit. I also swap hands when playing tennis, and use a mouse on the right . I wonder if. There are different degrees of leftyness or wether some of us just get on with it !!

I am lefthanded - the only one in the family. I have never found it to be an issue.

Writing is fine, I use cutlery the regular way around, I played the cello the regular way around. I use a keyboard and mouse as a righthanded person would.

I taught DS to tie his laces (me the leftie, he is right handed). It was straightforward. He just watched me and obviously adapted it to his way around (or maybe I do it the right way!?)

Perhaps some people are more ambidextrous than others? I can't say I have ever found it to be a problem being a leftie.

I'm a leftie and knit and crochet right-handed. It was too complicated for me to work out how to do it the other way round as I was taught by righties.

LH also, so is dd and so is my own mum. We don't do everything LH though.

I think there are degrees of left handedness. Some people are exclusively LH for everything but I think many of us probably aren't.

Re knitting (and I assume crochet too) the problem with learning left handed is that the patterns are all written for rh knitting. I do a sort of continental style knit where although the set up is right handed I do all the work with my left hand. I have never ever managed to use left handed scissors though and I use my left hand but use rh scissors