Can I insist that my DS does not do cursive or joined up handwriting

[WineAndChocolate]

My DS is in Y1 and is very very hypermobile. He is really struggling with his handwriting and can barely print let alone do cursive writing which is what they are doing in his class. I was talking to his teacher the other day and she said that she has never experienced a situation before where a child is bright and able but cannot write hardly at all. She is at a loss what to do and said that she is reliant on his OT to give her guidance. She said that he really needs one to one support in class with his work but because he is not statemented and is bright they just dont have the resources.

I am seeing his teacher on Wednesday for parents evening and want to insist that they drop cursive writing and allow him to master printing first. How will this go down? He has a job share and one of the teachers is very lovely and approachable and the other is the opposite so not sure if they will agree to it and also whether they will be able to teach 29 pupils one thing and my DS another.

What are your views?

We are doing all the exercises to build up his core so that eventually writing will be easier but I just dont want him stressing and losing confidence in the meantime.

I think rather than going in and making demands, you should go in and discuss the problems and your concerns and agree the best way forward.

If you make it clear that you are working as a team and all have your son's best interests at heart, you will get more than marching in and telling them what will happen.

If they are resistant, then get medical advice and say that it is important that you all follow the medical advice.

They/you could look into write dance if he is very active?

Depends on the teacher IME. I work with children with special needs and am often consulting in mainstream schools and handwriting frequently a problem. In the end, most of them have agreed that mastering print is the way forward, but not always without argument.

Handwriting without tears is a FANTASTIC programme. Any OT will have heard of it and most likely have the resources. Here is their website (US based): www.hwtears.com/hwt

On a side note, I really hate that they rush joined up writing here. Half of the kids I know can't print but can write joined up. It just makes no sense!

Hmm, perhaps a multi-prong attack?

Give the OT a ring (get the number from the teacher perhaps) - maybe the teacher hasn't seen this before but the OT surely will have? And have you talked to the SENCO? - I'd be amazed if more experienced teachers wouldn't have seen similar things at Yr1.

It's the teacher's job to differentiate the work. If he's not at the stage of cursive letter formation, then in handwriting sessions surely there is mark-making work he can do which leads on towards cursive writing? For creative work where the focus is not on the look of the writing, I think printing sounds fine.

Children who need support with perceptual/motor control for writing in ds's school do Write from the Start which the teachers rave about, though ds didn't do it so I can't report back on results. You could ask the OT about it, or any other programme they recommend?

Joined up writing is the bane of my life. I don't know if it's because they are pushed to do it too early, but they often come up to secondary with terrible handwriting, because they're trying to join up every letter. I often tell them to stop joining up their letters in the interest of legibility.

I would be very surprised if a teacher had not seen bright child with dreadful handwriting in year one. Is this a regular state school? My DS has only learnt to form his letters in year 2 and his ed psych suggested difficulties and frustrations with handwriting were not uncommon in exceptionally gifted children. Regardless of statement or not surely the teachers have to meet the childs needs and cant say they cant help or are at a loss. I would be horrified by this reaction.

Having said that my DS only learnt to form his letters following advice i received on MN and then we carried it out every single day over the 6 week summer holiday. It really did need daily 1 to 1 and school did not provide that but it did work though he was not hypermobile but had refused to hold a pen before starting school and was unsure which hand was dominant.

Please do. My son's inability to do the stupid cursive writing has destroyed all his confidence in writing anything.

My ds1 is extremely hypermobile - has Ehlers Danlos syndrome, hypermobility type. This made it very difficult for him to pull up his own trousers, do up buttons, open doors, open food packets, turn taps on and off, flush toilets, play with lego (he could neither push the bricks together effectively nor pull them apart), maintain a strong enough wrist position to be able to pour anything, cut with a knife without his fingers bending back in hideous directions etc, etc. Oddly, though, he never had any trouble whatsoever learning to do joined up writing, just took a while to develop sufficient strength not to tire out fairly quickly. However, he had an interest in writing and was more willing to perservere with that than he was with lego, playdough and the other things inflicted on him by OTs who never bothered to do anything for him beyond provide a useless sheet of activities he hated. I think, therefore, with hypermobile children, it's a question of finding something that they are willing to push their fatigued hands with more. (Piano was another thing that was fantastic for ds - made more difference to his ability to do small, neat writing and do anything else he needed to with his hands than anything else ever did). If you are convinced your ds will try harder and become demoralised less quickly learning to print first, and that this will help with his written communication, then push the point - anything is better than nothing. However, bear in mind that not much writing is actually expected in year 1. By the time lots of writing is expected, printing is a much slower way of doing it, and if you have poor letter formation even with printing, then I don't think it's much, if any, more legible - particularly if you are also poor at letter spacing, as it is impossible to tell where one word ends and the next begins if all your letters are badly done, separate from each other and random distances apart. In other words, if he learns how to print, he will also have to learn later on not to form his letters that way, but to form them the way required to join them up and then start joining them up. Or he could learn how to form his letters with the "flicks" required for joined up writing, but not have to actually join them up????? Basically, not learning joined up writing now when everyone else is is going to hold him back at some point.

Have you spoken to his OT about handwriting because most advocate fully cursive as being easier in the long term? I would be also be looking to implement a daily programme to develop core strength and stability so perhaps the OT could suggest ideas to use in school.

totally agree with mrz.

dd2 has cp and is extremely hypermobile with very poor fine motor - has been having extensive ot for her whole life. at just 8 they have realised that print is never going to happen - the stop/ start nature and the constant pen on/ off/ adjust position nature of print is extremely laborious and not at all productive. so she's being fast tracked with cursive and uses a net book in literacy. the cursive is soooooo much easier - no stop/ start. lifting the pencil up/ down, and her handwriting is almost legible for the first time ever.

i would really agree that discussion with the ot and class teacher is essential. sometimes print is by far the most difficult and wasting more time trying to master print when cursive is soooo much easier for some kids with low tone would be really counter-productive.

dd2 isn't ever going to be able to keep up with a pencil, really, but fast tracking onto cursive has to be the most sensible decision wrt handwriting that we've had in four years. that and the net book, natch.

i hadn't noticed the ds was just in y1. really this is very early to be fretting - usually the ot will offer workshops for handwriting and it's extremely likely that she'll be doing that quite soon. my dd2 is 8, in y3. in y1 i would really expect him to be continuing to practise alongside everyone else. illegible handwriting in y1 is practically the norm. as he hsa acknowledged issues with muscle tone, the ot will be aware that he will be needing additional support at this point in any case.

his ot will advise if specific grips or writing aids (slopes, cushions etc) could help. and of course, lots of continued fine motor exercises.

I fucking hate cursive writing! My dd's writing is actually quite legible when she doesn't join it all together but when she attempts cursive the writing is huge, doesn't sit on the line and is really hard to read. I asked if she could stop cursive but instead she now has half hour a day of cursive practice where she writes single letters over and over with the little flicks on them, total waste of tims IMO!

SocialButterfly - would you rather your dd wrote in print for the rest of her life? I'm not sure how quickly she would be able to do that for formal exams???? Or would you like her to learn cursive later on, when everyone else has already mastered it and can write quickly that way?

I still don't see why printing letters is supposed to be so much easier, rather than initially making individual letters more legible, but rapidly becoming inefficient and often itself illegible for different reasons when it is done on a larger scale (ie for proper writing, rather than practising short words and individual letters). It doesn't make keeping each letter an even size as you write any easier, it doesn't make spacing your letters out evenly with obvious spaces between words any easier, in the long run it is far slower (ie once you are genuinely writing, rather than attempting to write something that will be so badly spelt as to be almost illegible, anyway). I know that some people are so bad at writing that even as adults they have to print to be legible, but I also know a fair proportion of those adults who say this is the case because they got confused by being taught how to write one way and then another, and then when fashions changed, another, and they would much rather just have been taught how to write how they were going to be expected to write in school later on, from the beginning.

Ugh. Cursive writing was the bane of my existence all the way through primary school. Couldn't do it then, couldn't do it now, haven't written a single line of it since leaving. I too am really hypermobile and I really struggle writing legibly, always have done - it's easier printing, and I also find it easier with a fountain pen (maybe you could look into that for your DS?) . It's not a matter of fatigue either, I can write for hours, just not tidily, and on bad days I won't be able to read it back either. Suffice to say, computers are a lifesaver for me.

I think it's most important for you to make them understand, in a way that doesn't make them feel defensive, how hard this is for him. If there is a strategy they can use to teach him in such a way that works, great. If there isn't, it would be good if they didn't try and force him, and they must be very careful not to let the problems with handwriting cast a shadow on his achievements. I excelled in every subject at primary school, yet I was always getting in trouble because my handwriting wasn't nice. It always made me feel as if none of the stuff I was good at - that other children were getting praised for! - mattered. I'm...still slightly bitter, actually. So are my parents; they never did get that one through to the school.

I print, and do formal writing on a computer. I have never had any problems printing in exams, and the moment when I realised I could stop spending hours each week trying to make my fingers do things they will never be able to do was wonderful.

I had my work ridiculed and torn up in front of the class for bad handwriting. I got A grades and firsts as soon as I stopped having to spend all my time worrying, and nobody ever had trouble reading my printing.

I too hate cursive writing. My ds1 is in reception and is moreinterested in getting the leading in stroke right than getting the actual letter down.

Weird, the way it's taught here they can have quite separate letters, but in a pre-cursive style, for quite a while, the children are discouraged from truly joining up until at least y2, mostly. DS is y3 and not joining up yet.

The little girl I work with has fine-motor issues and I was totally horrified at the thought of doing cursive writing with her...but she seems to be doing better with it than printing, actually.

Computers are a lifesaver for people who continue to have problems with their handwriting. Writing by hand in print is NOT normally a lifesaver, just a pre-cursor to being allowed to use a computer to type at school. The only useful thing the OT told me with respect to my ds1 was to get him to learn to touch type, in preparation for the future. He loved learning and, by the time he does need to do that rather than rely on his handwriting, he'll be pretty good at it and reasonably fast.

I'm extremely hypermobile, certainly can't write with a "normal" pencil grip (nor can my children, one of whom is severely hypermobile with low muscle tone and the other who is like me, just excessively bendy!), but I just don't have trouble with writing (if you don't mind watching my thumbs flap all over the place). However, I hated writing with a fountain pen, as it made writing much, much more hard work, so I guess the lesson is, if you have problems writing, you have to experiment with all the options: not using a traditional grip for your pencil, but one of the other acceptable ways (which includes resting the pen or pencil between your forefinger and middle finger), or a technically unacceptable way (the one I opted for and which has never caused me any problems whatsoever); pencil grips (hated them - made writing much more work....); pencils; fountain pens; biros; specially designed pens (there are even pens that look a bit like wishbones....), etc. There are so many tools for writing out there and so many ways to hold a pen. If you are hypermobile, I don't think you are likely to be able to write neatly holding the pen the way everyone else does. Hypermobility doesn't automatically mean you will never be able to write neatly, though, just that you'll have to work harder finding a way to do it, or hope your problems are severe enough to be permitted to type your way through exams and schoolwork.

rabbitstew - it always makes me laugh how many ot's we come across who thumb-wrap. and then spend hours trying to teach kids how to hold a pencil.

but yy, no 'one-size-fits-all', but tbh until you've tried cursive, you won't know if it's easier or not. for some kids it's vastly easier, for others, not.

Rabbit stew - I would like her to be able to write in the way she finds easiest without being penalised, I join some of my letters but not all when I write. I think that getting her thoughts down on paper and progressing in literacy is more important than spending hours learning to join all her letters together. My dd is dyslexic and has auditory processing disorder so getting things down in paper is struggle enough.

If your daughter is dyslexic SocialButterfly then mastering joined handwriting is highly recommended by the British dyslexia association
www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/about-dyslexia/parents/help-with-handwriting.html

Children are less likely to reverse letters when using a cursive script so b/d. Using a joined script creates muscle memory which helps with spelling. It reinforces the phoneme patterns for writing and reading and can reduce errors because of the flow, continually stopping and lifting your pen in print to start each letter increases the potential for mistakes.

DS, who had poor fine motor skills (we used to do his spelling homework on rolls of wallpaper in Reception - he could spell the words but couldn't write them smaller than about 6 inches high with a big felt tip or a paintbrush) was totally transformed when moving to his current school which does cursive from the very start.

No printing, no flicks, just a LOT of cursive patterns followed by cursive script. I just wished he's been there for Reception too. Suddenly, order appeared out of chaos in his writing, there were distinctions between his words, the 'flow' of the process of writing matched the flow of his thought better, none of the stop-starting readjustment of printing. The school did it because they had previously seen a drop in writing standards in Year 3, when they were asking children to 'relearn' how to write using cursive rather than print. By never teaching print, they took away the dip AND raised writing standards in KS1 quite markedly.

I would suggest cursive-but-without-learning-printing-first, rather than pushing for printing.

I had to learn italic handwriting at Junior school! My handwriting is now a mish-mash of italic,cursive and printing,which developed whilst at senior school. It's actually quite tidy. Children at our school need to master basic printing before moving on to cursive. My own son (who went to this school) has really odd print/cursive writing as he just can't hold his pen correctly, even though I and his teachers tried hard to get him to do it properly. I'm not worried though, as it is legible, if a bit strange-looking.

ooh jamdonut, I had to learn italic too - I loved it then and now, though unfortunately I don't use a fountain pen any more - I was at junior school in West Kent, just wondered whether it was localised??