I am interested in working on the study of how people write whether it be children or adults. I am interested in the process of writing the different letters of the alphabet. I always think to myself, how could I teach the most basic thing without making it too complicated. I'm sure schools spend time on how to write letters, but a lot of the time, the letters as well as the numbers of young students are backwards or upside down. I work in an after school program five days a week, and a lot of the students I work with write either their letters backwards or upside down. Sometimes they confuse their "b"s and "d"s. For example, today, I had one student who came to me and said "Ms. Underhill, I am having trouble writing my "e"". He wrote his "e" like "Ə". I was confused at first then I saw that he attempted to make an "e" a couple times. All those "e"s looked like "Ə"s and they were all crossed out. I then took an eraser and erased his previous work and then in pencil I made the letter "e" by dotting it; I wanted him to trace over my dotted letter. You want to know how he traced it? He started at the bottom, did the curve part first them did the straight line. Although he did write the letter "e" correctly (not backwards or upside down), he did not write the letter "e" from top to bottom. Watching him write the letter "e" made me think. I don't want my future students writing like this. I do not want them to write their letters from bottom to top. I want to teach them how to write the alphabet properly so they do not run into problems later in life.
Then another thought popped into my head. I like to watch other people write letters, and some of the people I like to watch are leftys. They make their letters so different than the way rightys write them but they make them correctly. That got me thinking as well. How will I teach the leftys in the class how to write. Do I teach them how to write their letters like a righty would or would I show them a different way?
I as well work with young children after school. I work with Kindergarten and Pre-K students and I have also asked myself what is the best way to teach them how to write considering that a few of my students as well write their letters upside down and backwards. After reading your questions in regards to how righy or lefty children learn how to write, maybe the children that are writing backwards or upside down are using an opposite hand than you. You have me thinking now and I am def. going to observe this is in my classroom!
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