The Icknield Primary School
Thrive and achieve together!
Handwriting
Handwriting
National Curriculum Objectives
The following document outlines the main objectives taught in each year group for handwriting:
At Icknield, we have put these objectives into a simple document which show the coverage for each year group every year and also which outlines the Cursive Handwriting Scheme which we use:
Supporting Your Child
Here are some tips or activities to do with your child to support him or her with handwriting:
1. Get to grips with what is being taught in your child's year group.
Have a look at our handwriting scheme above to see what is being taught in each year group. It contains the main approach we use as a school. We have also created a parents' guide which links to some videos in our gallery showing how the letters are formed:
2. Play games and have fun!
Handwriting doesn't have to be sitting down and writing - it can be drawing letters on backs, on floors (get some giant chalk!), or forming letters out of materials, like sand or even pebbles on a beach. This is particularly important for younger children. It can and should involve paper as children get older. Parents may want to buy special pens, exciting paper or notebooks - just about anything to make the handwriting process as enjoyable as possible.
3. Practice makes perfect!
Keep working hard on handwriting. It is not something that can happen overnight but with practice, all children can improve and have a neat script to be proud of.
4. Get your children to teach you!
We imagine that you may not have learnt to form your handwriting this way when you were at school but it's never to late to learn the cursive script and children make great teachers! All adults at Icknield use this style of handwriting - some of them even use it to write their shopping lists! - and they all learnt the style as adults.
5. Expect good handwriting all the time
Children should be encouraged to use their best handwriting as often as possible for example when completing homework. This is especially important in the learning of spellings as the brain forms a connection with the movement of the hand, engraining the spelling into the memory. This is why learning spellings on a computer is not as good as learning them by hand and even though computers (and other technology) are important, they are not necessarily better than some old-fashioned methods such as paper and pencil!