Handwriting

[alem]

Hi, both my children (age 7 and 8) need to work on their handwriting, and I was going to make a start with this over the holidays.
Can anyone suggest good resources for this? Do I need to buy a work book, or can I download work sheets from the internet? Do they need to work on particular 'drills', or just copy out x paragraphs per day?
Thanks for any advice.

Don't use work books or sheets that focus on tracing over dotty letters or greyed out lines. Much better to use handwriting lines and teach correct formation of letters.

Teach in letter families
c, o, a, d, g, s, e, q, f
l, i, t, u, y, j,
r, n, m, h, k, p, b
v, w, x, z

Are they using cursive? Joined or not?

Get them to write:-

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

It uses all the letters in the alphabet. This on top of the letter families, as mrz suggested, will help enormously.

Thank you both. Yes, they are writing joined up. I knew they weren't that neat, my ds especially, but the end of term reports both mentioned it as something to work on, and I didn't know where to start.

We were told to make sure they were forming letters correctly as it make all the difference to tidiness of cursive. I bought some handwriting books from Amazon with the 3 lines to help get tall, short and underground letters in proportion.

We also did lines of patterns in various colours, DD loved it. We used these as an inspiration

Mrz, my DD age 5 is keen to practice her handwriting, did I see you recommend a particular pen for little ones to use for writing on here aaaaages ago or did I imagine that? I'm find my uni ball pens she's smudges and wasn't sure what to go for! Thank you!

I would use soft pencils rather than pens when first starting out

Anything for fine motor control so crafts etc. And something that motivates them so it's not a task to be completed at speed because they want it over and done with. so anything from asking them to write you a piece to persuade you to go to the park later, or about their interests, an info book on their hobby, letter to their favourite sports star, make a newspaper etc, with reminders to be as neat as possible.

Writing on a vertical surface is good

Thank you! I will ask her to use a pencil for now! Thanks for the tip about vertical surfaces!

My primary (a top private) school insisted everybody use ink pens instead of biros, because biros are too fast to write neatly.

Even four year olds?

I can't remember, but I remember I only had ink pens until secondary school, and my hand writing was the neatest in the class.

In my ordinary state primary we used fountain pens once we'd learnt how to form letters correctly.