Veteran teacher Nancy Bailey offers some common sense advice about how to help students become better readers and writers. Her advice is meant for students with or without disabilities.
Here are first two suggestions:
I welcome teachers and parents to add whatever they’d like to share, what works for you, or special resource pages or links.
Handwriting
Teachers don’t always focus on handwriting because of other skills they are made to address. The focus on technology has sometimes pushed handwriting out of the picture. So, helping students, especially students with reading or writing (dysgraphia) disabilities, become better at handwriting at home, might be a beneficial exercise at this time.
Teachers struggle to understand what students mean when they turn in sloppy papers. Even if students misspell words, it’s much easier to see the breakdown of their errors and help them correct their papers, when letters are neatly printed or written in cursive.
***Don’t push a child to write if they have difficulty holding a pencil or if they are too young.
Holding a pencil.
This may seem strange, but many students don’t know how to hold a pencil! My husband teaches college students and remarks about the many strange ways he has observed students holding pencils and pens in a cramped and uncomfortable manner.
The pencil should be held between the thumb and middle finger with the index finger riding the pencil. The pencil should be grasped above the sharpened point. Pencil grippers are helpful, or some tape or a rubber band wrapped around the pencil can help with gripping.
Younger children work better with larger pencils.
As a left-handed writer with horrible handwriting, I should remain silent. But I have noticed young adults who literally don’t know how to hold a pencil and whose handwriting is even worse than mine.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As usual. Bailey provides sound advice. Parents are spending more time at home with children can help children work on careless handwriting. My daughter is helping my ten year old grandson improve his sloppy handwriting. She is mostly trying to get him to unlearn bad habits.
Schools are sending home packets of work to be completed, and online assignments as well. This pause in regular schooling is the perfect time to get students to do self selected, recreational reading. With all the so called worksheets in schools electronic and otherwise, there is very little actual time spent on reading in many schools. I have provided my grandson with a fiction and non-fiction home library. It is also the perfect time for for parents to read aloud to children, even if children are readers. My daughter is reading my grandson chapters on Greek and Roman mythology. My grandson is reading “The Adventures of Captain Underpants.” My grandson is a reluctant reader so reading something appealing sparks his interest. My daughter commented that my grandson is doing more reading now than he did in school. Perhaps the lack of sustained reading in schools is contributing to the NAEP score decline.
Handwriting for lefties is a challenge. Despite being left-handed, my writing is teacher “neat.” When handwriting is on display as in teaching, there is motive to ensure that students can read it.
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BTW, Peter Greene has a four part post “Why Teach Literature Stuff.” He makes the case for continuing to read real literature. He also clearly shows why screens cannot replace books.
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Will Smith shows the proper way to hold a pencil
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Lefties usually hold the pencil or pen too close to the point and have the paper oriented in a “wrong” position for (a) seeing what has been written and (b) avoiding smears if using soft or wet media. The two-factor tutorial below from an adult is meticulously detailed. It has had many views. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRk_t49dZ2Q
Elsewhere on the internet you can find devices to help beginners who are left-handed develop habits that will benefit them. Left-handed children who begin with bad habits may reverse these with guided practice, but it may take six weeks of guided practice to reverse old habits.
There are also many illustrations of classroom furnishings designed as if there is no need to accommodate lefties.
Teachers of the visual arts used to be active in helping children see and practice handwriting and lettering as art forms. Computers have not helped provide that instruction, or other small motor skills such as holding scissors and cutting paper or cloth with ease and confidence.
There are many other assistive devices for writing, drawing, and the like for children and adults.
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I can remember in college we had blue book final exams. The college also had mostly chairs with a right sided writing surface, but each class had two or three left sided chairs as well. As a lefty, I used to get to the exams early so I could try to get a left sided chair. Otherwise, I had to twist in an uncomfortable position causing a back spasm and left arm fatigue.
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Here’s a review essay on cursive handwriting on penmanship from Mark’s Text Terminal that I put together last June: https://wp.me/p50jv5-3jV
And thanks again, Diane, for permitting this in your fora.
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“Special” resources…Personal Knowledge, Tacit Dimension-Michael Polanyi
If the product of “know-that” WAS “know-how”, kazillions of “adult” custodians
would be out of a job.
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Tech lovers have been telling me for years to teach not handwriting, but keyboarding (which is an ad gimmick word foolishly used to replace the word ‘typing’ in order to create the false sense that typing on a keyboard is futuristic). Quick-paced typing is supposed to result in higher test scores, the idea of which itself raises questions about the meaninglessness of test scores. There are far too many benefits to be gained from handwriting for me to abandon it. Unfortunately, unless all my students have scanners, I will only be reading their typing for a while, during the shutdown. One of the myriad of reasons why online shutdown activities cannot be compared to the education my students receive with me in person.
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sad how over and over we can see where kids benefit from something, but those who wish to ‘reform’ and ‘fix’ are not interested in broad student growth: it is becoming all tech or nothing
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It shouldn’t be all or nothing, but it is, nowadays. Some kinds of tech can be useful in moderation. Use of tech should simply be bottom-up instead of top-down implemented in schools, under normal circumstances.
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I know a superintendent who believes handwriting aids memory formation, whereas typing does not. But for some reason, he just spent a hundred million dollars this month on keyboards. Go figure.
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This is basic stuff that should be explained to first-graders by their teachers: letters, sounds, making words, teaching reading and writing together, teaching longhand, correct posturing, light from the left, etc. I was taught all this when I started my fist day at school as a student. I guess, this just says enough about what pre-service teachers are being taught nowadays (equity, group projects, self-inquiry) and what they are not being taught.
On the other hand, knowing that so many American suburban schools resemble military barracks with low ceilings, small windows always covered with meaningless charts, step-by-step instructions and goals (“we don’t want our students to get distracted by what is outside of the class”), with tiny desks that cannot fit a textbook and notebook together, leaving students’ elbows hanging in the air when they write, with Procrustes-type chairs bolted to the desks… it is no wonder that worrying about proper pen holding is not even on teachers’ radar.
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Nancy Bailey is always worth reading, smart, experienced, helpful, thank you.
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There is a photo of how to properly hold a pencil on the web page “Guided Writing/Writing Workshops/etc. http://maryidefalco.com/reading%20site%20reconnected/33.Writing__Guided_%26_Wksp.html
Scroll down on the right near the bottom.
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Or we can look a couple of centuries back:
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I appreciate the kind and helpful comments and links here. I hope they’re helpful to parents. Thanks for posting, Diane!
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