The dreaded ‘handwriting’ has come up again in unschool groups (which, truthfully, often seem like groundhog day)…
So, I was searching through for an old post I wrote in 2017, this one, where I expounded on handwriting, it’s uses, how it’s learnt, and said Kai wasn’t handwriting, didn’t have a need, and I was sure that if he did ever have a need, he’d learn quickly and be up to scratch with his peers in a week.
Well, that kind of happened in the past few weeks! All thanks to Dungeons & Dragons. He’s been playing with his online gaming friends – they run a campaign over Discord. Sometimes I’m here to help with writing, but sometimes I’m not, and it was getting annoying for him being so slow and/or waiting for me.
So, I gave him a softer pencil, told him it’s easier to write on a hard surface (he was trying to write on a sheet of A4 on his lap!) and said to copy the keyboard if he forgot what a letter looked like.
After a few days, while his writing won’t win any awards, it was much, much improved, and his confidence in it, and ability to do it, had soared, too.
In the earlier post, I shared this picture of some of my students writing samples (students who go to school 6 days a week, since Kindergarten):
The top one is from a student in Year 8 – a year older than Kai is now. The bottom two are from Year 10 students – 15 or 16 year olds.
These samples are Kai’s Spellbook from this month:
Like I said, not winning any awards for neatness or cursive, but it’s readable, and not too much worse than the school sample from a kid one year older, who has been drilled his whole life.
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