tips for helping reluctant Y1 left-handed writer

[PiedWagtail]

Is there anything I can do at home to help ds write? he gets frustrated. His writing is quite big and messy and he does not form all his letters correctly. He says they do too much writing in Yr 1 and he gets cross and fed up with it. how to keep him interested and get him more fluent? thanks!

Reluctant writers are usually more interested if there is a 'real' reason for writing - shopping lists, letters to people etc.

A selection of different pens/pencils/coloured paper might also make it more appealling.

Children struggling with handwriting sometimes benefit from triangular pencils or triangular pencil grips as they reduce the hand ache they can get from holding a normal pencil to tight in an attepmt to make their writing neat.

Lefties sometimes find writing on a slope (a ring binder folder) easier than a flat desk, also try and get him to turn his paper so it is a comfortable angle for him rather than square with the edge of the desk.

Hope this might help.

OP ...I so feel for you ....I had this problem with my ds2..other ds's and my self RH.

PRACTICE ..PRACTICE ...PRACTICE ....eventually he will find a comfortable slant or style to his writting .

I had heard and it seems to be true of my ds that when they get into joined up writting it is easier .

Try and get him to copy (anything)from papers/magazines that he likes in different ways and I d think smaller writting helps ...ds has gone from XL to PETITE BUT NEAT !!!!!!

If you are RH try writting for 15/20 mins with LH and it will give you an understanding of how our sentences and words are formed geered towards RHness !!

HTH

There are some left handed writing workbooks available at Amazon, which we found really helpful. The angle of his writing arm should be the same as his paper, if you understand what I mean! Also, a few letters are formed differently from right handed writing, in particular the ones which are crossed like t. It is well worth learning to form everything correctly at this stage, as it is very tricky to correct later. Drawing is also wonderful for pencil control and mazes.

I'm LH. Let him position his paper and his pencil in a way that feels comfortable to him.

Many boys this age are reluctant writers and milly is right, a lot of reluctant writers (and particularly boys in general it seems for some reason) prefer to write for a purpose.

What is he interested in?

Perhaps you could help him at home to make a comic or he could write some dinosaur fact files. Ask him to do you a favour by writing a note you can leave for daddy while you do another job (and then text the message to daddy in case his writing isn't very clear) or to write the shopping list for you because you are too busy (DD loves this one!). Or if he shows an interest in the men digging up the road outside, he can write a letter to them asking them about their job - you might have to write the reply yourself though!

I do always caution parents against focusing too much on the left handedness. It is true that if you are RH and you try experiencing writing as a leftie then it will seem a bit of a pain but for most of us we just get on with it. If it is causing obvious problems then of course address them, but I've encountered people on here and IRL who seem to regard LH almost as an SEN. It really isn't

Oh gosh !! Ihope Idid not come across as LH being SEN..nononono! it IS normal ...but just might be needed to be approached differently ,with different helps ....my ds found (well his teacher and I did ) that a sharp pencil helped neatness .

He now writes with slant to the right ..joined up ...and I can read it !!!!!

folkgirl ..did you not find though that letter formation is from a RH angle/view ..and LH could be shown a different way ....??? just a querry ..out of curiosoty...

Oh no bizzey! I just ended up having a bit of an heated debate on another thread aaaggessss ago with someone who just wouldn't accept that it wasn't .

I agree with you that the world is set up to be RH and I think that when you are RH and then you try and experience it from a LH perspective it seems more difficult/tricky, but for the LH-er it's just how it is - don't know any different!

I was taught letter formation the standard way (they still made no concessions in my day). I have come across the idea of LH letter formation, but tbh, when I looked into it, it's only a couple of letters that are formed slightly differently (crossing the t from r-l rather than l-r). Which doesn't really seem to make enough of a difference to be bothered about and I would imagine many children would adopt this anyway if it was more natural (since realised I do this).

I did experiment when I was younger with paper/arm position and learning to write with a fountain pen was a nightmare for smudging. I think it's important to just let the child experiment a bit. But as you've seen, they all get there eventually!