Messy Handwriting in Kids: What to Look At Before You Say Anything

The national curriculum for England lists what Year 1 pupils should be taught about handwriting (English programmes of study, key stages 1 and 2). The first items are:

• sit correctly at a table, holding a pencil comfortably and correctly
• begin to form lower-case letters in the correct direction, starting and finishing in the right place

Making letters the same size comes a year later. In Year 2, pupils are taught to “form lower-case letters of the correct size relative to one another” and to “use spacing between words that reflects the size of the letters.”

So the curriculum separates two things that “messy” tends to lump together. One is how a letter is formed: where the pencil starts, which way it moves, where it stops. The other is how even the letters look next to each other. A child in Year 1 can form a letter from the right place and still have letters of different sizes on the same line. In the curriculum, the second part is taught after the first.

The non-statutory guidance for Year 1 adds that the pencil or pen “should not be too large for a young pupil’s hand” and that left-handed pupils “should receive specific teaching to meet their needs.”

When legibility grows

Steve Graham and colleagues published a 1998 study of handwriting speed and legibility in 900 children in grades 1 to 9. Each child did three tasks: copying, writing a story and writing an essay.

Copying speed generally went up with each grade and levelled off in grade 9, close to adult speed. Gains in legibility on the three tasks were mostly limited to the intermediate grades. Girls’ handwriting was more legible than boys’, and girls wrote faster in grades 1, 6 and 7.

The study also looked at speed and legibility together. On the story and essay tasks, speed made a statistically significant contribution to predicting legibility, but it accounted for only 1% of the variance.

Why handwriting goes wrong

A 2007 review by Feder and Majnemer lists skills that handwriting depends on: fine motor control, bilateral and visual-motor integration, motor planning, in-hand manipulation, proprioception, visual perception, sustained attention and sensory awareness of the fingers. It describes poor handwriting as related to intrinsic factors, the child’s actual handwriting capabilities, or extrinsic factors, which are environmental or biomechanical, or both.

The pencil and posture side is covered in How to Teach Pencil Grip and Weak Pencil Pressure in Children.

For younger children, the CDC’s milestone list has “writes some letters in her name” by age 5, and describes milestones as things most children, 75% or more, can do by that age. When letters first appear is covered in When Do Kids Start Writing Letters?

Neat for what

The same curriculum has a line for Years 5 and 6: pupils “should be clear about what standard of handwriting is appropriate for a particular task, for example, quick notes or a final handwritten version.” The guidance next to it says handwriting speed should increase “so that problems with forming letters do not get in the way of their writing down what they want to say.”

In the curriculum, then, there is no single standard of neat. A shopping list and a birthday card can be held to different ones, and older pupils are expected to know the difference themselves.

What the sources give you to work with

Put together, these sources suggest some things to check before saying anything.

Formation or evenness. Did the letter start in the right place and go the right way? Or is it formed well and just uneven next to its neighbours? The curriculum teaches the first in Year 1 and the second in Year 2.

One place, not the whole page. In the curriculum’s own terms, a comment points at something specific: “this one started at the bottom,” “these two are different sizes.”

What the writing is for. A note to self and a card for a grandparent need not meet the same standard.

How to praise. Research comparing praise for the child (“you’re a good girl”) with praise for what the child did is in Do Reward Stickers Backfire?

My Font in BrainDojo Kids

BrainDojo Kids is an iPhone and iPad app I make for ages 3 to 6, where children write on the screen with a finger or a pen to practice letters and numbers.

My Font is a tool where the child taps a box on a chart and writes one character at a time from a model. The screen says “Look at the example and write big.” With the app set to English, the charts are the alphabet and the numbers. When a parent turns on “Use My Font” in settings, the letters in the app are shown in the child’s own handwriting. Making and using it is free. With Premium, the current chart can be saved as a version with the date and the child’s age, and later restored or exported as a font.

The three daily games in Today’s Training and the four Recommended games are free each day, and every other game can be tried once. In the parent settings there is a daily time limit, on by default at 10 minutes. There are no ads and no account to create. The app is free to start, and a Premium subscription (monthly or yearly) opens all courses and games. The first session is covered in Getting Started with BrainDojo Kids.