Last year, I was a somewhat reluctant first-time homeschool mom. I felt like the right person for the job in a lot of ways, but I'd never taught a child to read and write before, and I wasn't sure I was equipped for that particular learning curve.
Kindergarten is a beautiful year: learning through play, building social skills, and laying the foundations for literacy and numeracy. But for our family, beginning to write was one of the hardest parts. So I did a bit of a research deep dive.
I learned that writing is a lot more complicated than it looks. It asks several different skills to work together at once, and for a young child, those skills are still developing… and not necessarily all at the same pace.
One thing that helped us was paying attention to what felt demanding for my child and getting curious about what a smaller next step might look like. In the process, I found several ways to work on writing-related skills without asking my child to sit down and write.
Here are five ideas to try:
1. Instead of writing letters, make them
We kept stumbling across new materials to make letters with: pop tubes, bead necklaces, wax sticks, even rain boots.
Building a letter with your hands instead of having to reproduce it with a pencil gives kids a chance to notice its shape, experiment with how its parts fit together, and practise recognizing letters without the pressure of getting handwriting “right.”
What unconventional letter-making materials will you discover?
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2. Play games that build spatial awareness and letter recognition
Some of the skills involved in writing have very little to do with holding a pencil.
For spatial awareness, we liked tile-matching games such as Carcasonne or Rivers, Roads & Rails where you match edges to complete a pattern. For letter recognition, try an alphabet version of Go Fish, or a letter matching game like DIB dab.
The goal isn't to turn every game into a learning activity. It's simply to notice where your child can practise a skill while doing something they already enjoy.
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3. Reinvent the worksheet
You don't have to throw out your worksheets, but sometimes you can change the way you do it.
Use sidewalk chalk to draw a maze in the shape of a letter, then walk the path. Make a DIY connect-the-dots in the shape of a letter and solve it. Write a secret message on Post-it Notes, and instead of writing the missing letters, draw something that starts with that letter's sound.
When a particular task feels too demanding, changing the format can make it possible to practise the same underlying idea in a completely different way.
4. Try an obstacle course
Writing requires our brains and bodies to coordinate a surprisingly complicated sequence of movements. An obstacle course gives kids a chance to practise some of those same kinds of skills while running, climbing, crawling, jumping, and planning their way through a course.
Your child can decide what comes first, what comes next, and how to get from one obstacle to another. And nobody has to call it handwriting practice.
5. Try crafts that build fine motor skills and hand strength
Pipettes or droppers are a great way to get little hands working. Try this bleeding-tissue-paper craft for a magical result.
Tear tissue paper into small pieces in as many colours as you like, then arrange them into a design on a white sheet of paper. It could be a shape, a scene, or even a letter of the alphabet. Use a pipette to sprinkle water over the tissue paper until it's fully wet. The next day, brush off the dry tissue paper and see what's left behind.
It's a simple activity, but it gives little hands plenty to do: squeezing, aiming, controlling the dropper. (Just a warning: the dye can stain, so this is definitely a mess-allowed-zone activity.)
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Learning to write is a big achievement for any child. These are just five ways in.
For us, taking some of the pressure off writing itself made it easier to keep practising the skills that support it. Sometimes the best way to help a child move toward writing is to give them permission to do something completely different for a while. I hope one of them brings a little more joy to your practice time.
