Learning to Write - Preparing Your Child Through Play

Your child is learning to write from the day she's born. If you want proof, look down at your hand, at her tiny fingers wrapped around yours. Granted, she'll spend a few years trying to decide whether she prefers her left hand to her right, but that's okay because that will give you plenty of time to study the acuity with which she selects each Cheerio off of her high chair tray to throw on your just-mopped floor. That routine she's engaging in, bringing her index finger and thumb together is critical to being able to hold a pencil later in life; she's developing per pincer grasp.

Soon she'll be ready to color, and you'll notice that she picks up a crayon and starts to move it across the paper the same way you would hold a microphone. It's called the palmer grasp, and it's not exactly efficient for coloring, but coloring is much harder than picking up Cheerios and giving them to the dog! There are tons of activities that your child engages in every day that strengthen her pincer grasp and get her ready for school, but here are some that you can do with her or that teachers can do in a preschool setting if you want to spend some time focusing on fine motor skills.

SortingActivities
Sorting is a great activity for toddlers. They can sort by color, by big and small, by hard and soft, by wet and dry. Preschoolers can sort in a much more detailed way: by shape, purpose, consistency, or by guidelines that they're given. A good pincer grasp sorting activity (for older 3's and up) requires only an egg carton, small to medium sized beads with big holes, and a pair of tweezers. Have your child or your group sort the beads into different sections of the egg carton by color or shape or whatever criteria you want using only the tweezers to move them. You can even put some math in the mix by asking them to sort in a pattern: first put red beads in each section, then blue, then red again, etc.

Fine motor skills development more quickly in girls than they do in boys, so if you want to do an activity like this with boys, try making it much more messy and intriguing. Take the activity outside (or use an inside sand table) and hide beads or other small things like washers or beans in the sandbox and then stack containers up along the edge. Give each child a set of tweezers and then have a contest to see who can find the most beads and get them into their cup using only the tweezers in a specified amount of time. If you get them sufficiently involved in this activity, they'll keep it up long after you've moved onto another group or need to go make dinner.

Cooking Activiites
Speaking of dinner, cooking activities are another excellent way to work on fine motor skills. Let your child be in charge of measuring the ingredients and delivering them to the bowl or pan without spilling them. Working with different types of spoons and cups is great grasping practice, and if you have toddlers who aren't quite up to really helping you in the kitchen, give them cups and spoons to play with on the floor. It's never too early to start!

Intricate Building and Art Projects
Help your rough and tumble boys practice their fine motor skills by breaking out the Legos, Tinkey Toys, Lincoln Logs or any other building blocks you have that require connection. Encourage your child to build something that takes longer than five minutes, perhaps working on something to show Dad when he gets home from work or to show parents when they pick up from preschool that day. If building blocks don't hold your child's interest, grab some poster board, glue and collage materials such as scraps of paper, ribbon, fabric, some sequins, hole-punched shapes, safety scissors and any other crafty doo dads you have and encourage your child make a fantastic collage. You can let your child dictate the story to you when it's all done and you can write it down together, hanging it from the bottom of the picture.

I offer this information and these activities so that you can enrich your child's learning environment, but not to make you think that you have to do something specific in order for your child to learn to write. You don't. Your child will learn when she is ready, just like she learned to walk to talk. You provided your child with encouragement then, with a safe place to toddle around and with lots of coos and smiles when she talked to you. Learning these skills is no different. Provide a supporting and nurturing environment, and your child will be write on schedule.