The best (and surprising!) way to build writing skills

We know every child has their own individual interests and skills, which means every child’s path to mastering skills is unique. But it can still be difficult to keep calm if their friends seem to have got to grips with a skill that your child hasn’t yet. Sometimes it can help to think about the progress your child has already made, and the skills they have mastered, and remember that one skill builds on another as your child develops.  

Skills like writing and drawing might start to feel really important, as your child gets closer to starting school or simply as they move into a pre-school room at nursery. And many of us have been tempted to try to get our child to master these skills a bit more quickly, perhaps by getting them to trace over pictures or shapes.  

The thing is – these skills are much more complicated than they seem, especially to adults who have long forgotten the combination of thinking and movement needed when we first start to draw accurately.  

For most of us, writing and drawing is automatic, and it is only when we are really thinking about being neat that we might think more carefully about how we control our arms, wrists and fingers.  

If your child isn’t copying shapes and lines, rather than getting them to copy or trace – it might help to get them moving, climbing, and making big lines or curves with large brushes or crayons. 

To copy lines and shapes, your child needs to control their posture and balance, hold a pen or pencil comfortably, and control the movement of their arms, wrist and finger – they need to judge how much pressure to put on the paper, and adjust their movements to keep copying accurately.  

This takes concentration and well-developed physical skills, which they will develop by moving a lot – with both big and small movements being really important.  

Perhaps it’s because this development and progress is not so ‘visible’ that we can worry.  

We might be tempted to hurry our child along to the next step, so we get to a stage where we can see from their drawings or writing that they are developing these skills. But this may not be helping them build on the skills they really need right now, so encouraging lots of movement and building strength can, in fact, have more impact on their ability to write and draw later on than sitting at a table and using a pencil will now. 

Why not look back through your child’s skills journey and remind yourself of all the skills they have mastered? And use the activities tab to find lots of playful ways to keep them moving and help them build strong foundations for drawing, writing and many other skills.