Learning To Write

Kieran has the worst handwriting ever. Yes, he is only in Junior Kindergarten and yes, he still is only 4 years old, but it's awful!

Of course, he only writes one word: his name. And, since he practices tht word just about every day, you'd think that he'd be starting to get pretty good at it.

First off, even with tonnes of practice, his letters suck! Even when you show him how to write a letter, he does it his own way, which looks nothing like the letter should look.

For instance, the letter "K". I watched him write his name today, since we were trying to make Valentines for his class, and I noticed his "K" was completely wonky, so I pulled out his scrapbook and tried to teach him how to write the letter by making a long vertical stroke with a lesser than sign attached to it. I wrote the letter, verbally explaining it, and then I held Kieran's hand and we wrote the letter together, and then I had Kieran write it out. Of course, he wrote it a completely different way every time.

I found this incredibly frustrating!

On top f that, he just doesn't fully appreciate that words begin with their starting letter and then go rightways until they finish. As you can see in the bottom most heart, Kieran ran out of space to write his name and decided to put the "A" and "N" in front of the "KIER".

Then there is the writing the "E" backwards. And the fact that the "R" looks like an "A".

I've seen the penmanship of the other kids in his class and Kieran is definitely lagging way behind the curve.

With these Valentines cards, I want Kieran's classmates to know who the card came from! I don't want them to have to deduce from a process of elimination that the illegible card must have come from Kieran because they can read everyone's names on their cards and Kieran is missing from that bunch. I also don't want them explaining to their mommies that this Valentine must have come from Kieran because he can't write anything nicely at all!

With all this focus on writing his name Kieran absolutely refused to write his name on the cards. So, I tried bribery. I offered one gummy worm for every five cards he signs.

It wasn't enough.

I raised the stakes to five gummy worms. It still wasn't enough. I started to feel myself losing my cool.

I had already conceived the craft we were doing (instead of buying paper valentines with cartoon characters licensed from a mega corp), and done most of the preparation and assembly. I was not going to sign Kieran's cards for him, too!

I bargained: if he signed his name, I would write all of his friends names on the cards. No dice.

Finally I hit on something that seemed to motivate him. I asked him to sign the card for a specific and special friend whom he rides the schoolbus with every morning. He liked that idea. He eagerly sat in his seat, grabbed a marker and a heart and then nothing. He waffled. He didn't want to screw up (good job mommy from hell!) and was scared to start the "K".

And then I did something so profoundly simple but ultimately so powerful: I put six dots on the card where I wanted him to write his name and told him to write a letter on top of each dot.

And he did it! What's more: he did it neatly and all the letters fit into the space on the card and proceeded in order.

His penmanship is still horrible, but at least we will get the damned valentine's cards finished.