Practice Makes Perfect!

The best way for children to develop their writing is through regular practice. However, for children who find writing more challenging, practising can sometimes feel like hard work and may become off-putting.

Finding creative ways to weave writing into everyday activities can make a real difference. Keeping writing purposeful, enjoyable and pressure-free can help your child build confidence while developing this essential life skill.

Early Writing

Before children are ready to write confidently, they need to develop strength and control in their hands, arms and upper body. These physical skills help children to hold and control a pencil effectively.

Pre-writing activities that develop fine motor skills are therefore an important part of early writing development. Below, you will find some activities designed to strengthen these skills that you may wish to try with your child at home.

Learning to form letters correctly is also an essential part of becoming a fluent and confident writer. Developing good habits from the beginning of a child's writing journey can make learning to write much easier.

When children begin forming letters, it is important that they learn lower-case letters first, rather than using capital letters throughout their writing. At school, children will use lower-case letters for most of their writing, using capital letters only where appropriate. Learning the correct formation from the outset helps to prevent habits that can be difficult to change later.

Continuous Cursive Handwriting

At Cedarwood, we teach pupils to write using a continuous cursive handwriting style. This begins in Year 1, when pupils learn to use the 'zoom ins' and 'flicks out' on their letters. In Year 2, they begin to use these movements to join their letters.

Developing a fluent handwriting style can support children's fine motor skills, coordination and writing fluency. Joining letters can also help children recognise and remember common letter sequences and spelling patterns, as words begin to feel like connected units rather than a series of individual letters.

As handwriting becomes more automatic, children have more capacity to concentrate on what they want to say. Rather than focusing on how to form each individual letter, they can give greater attention to their ideas, vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar and punctuation.

Fluent handwriting can also help children to write more efficiently as they progress through school, particularly when completing longer pieces of work or working within a time limit.

Below, you will find some tips for supporting early writing development, together with a guide showing how we form our continuous cursive letters at Cedarwood.

Building Writing Confidence

For some children, particularly those with additional learning needs such as dyslexia, confidence in writing can easily be knocked. Writing is a complex task that requires children to think about many things at once: ideas, vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, spelling and handwriting.

Even experienced authors rarely get everything right the first time. They edit, improve and redraft their work too!

When your child writes at home, try to celebrate their ideas, effort and creativity rather than focusing on every error. Accuracy develops over time with teaching and practice. If there is a particular aspect of writing that your child is currently working on at school, this will be communicated through their homework or class newsletter.

Encourage Free Writing

'Free writing' is the term we use in school for opportunities where pupils can write freely and explore their own ideas. Children enjoy having the freedom to choose their own topics and experiment with different forms of writing.

You could encourage this at home by giving your child opportunities to write about something that interests them. This might be a story, comic, diary entry, letter, shopping list, set of instructions or anything else that gives their writing a real and enjoyable purpose.

Most importantly, remember that less is often more. A short piece of writing that your child has enjoyed creating is every bit as valuable as pages and pages of words.

If you or your child would like any further advice or support with writing, Miss Hales - our Writing Lead, will be delighted to help.