Educational Approaches to Writing Letters

In our previous blog post we wrote about the activities that help develop fine motor skills. The skills are important because depending on how well they are developed your kid would be able to cope with writing. 

Some of you might wonder if there’s a particular order alphabet letters should be learned. Well, there are several approaches. Let's have a look at some of them.

Some say, that letters are easier learned by introducing first “the lined letters”, then the "circular or half circle letters”, and finally letters with diagonal elements. According to some educators, diagonal perception does not come in developmentally until 4 1/2 years to 5 years of age.  

For your convenience we split all alphabet letters into the three categories and came up with the following chart. You might want to use it for your reference when you start teaching your kids writing. 

 “Handwriting Without Tears” offers another approach. Among the first letters they start teaching are F, E, D, P, B, R, N, and M. They are called Frog Jump Capitals because in order to write one of these letters you need to “jump” high in the left corner, then make the line drop down, and then “jump” back to the top of the line to continue the letter. 

One more approach suggests to start with the letters a kid has in the name. This sounds very personal, as kids like recognizing and writing their names. In this situation it doesn’t actually matter whether letters are circular or have diagonals, kids will be motivated to learn them just because it’s their name.