How is writing taught in Prep/Foundation?

[wysiwyg]

Thanks for the info Kateo - DD is a very 'why' child just like her mum - and I couldn't answer at first why she should do them a different way - I will explain to her and see what happens - she certainly loves writing at the moment and would like that to continue. (Capital letters - it seems a bit pointless to me e.g. capital M - surely it will never be joined at the beginning e.g. 'theM' only as 'Men' - so why it is better to do the a down stroke then from the top do the V bit instead of just one up, down, up, down. That is assuming you don't join capital letters when used altogether e.g. in THEM?)

Also she is forever correcting me for not having the 'tail' as she calls it on a lower case r for example - now for me I would never do a tail on an r, but it seems the tail is important for moving on to cursive? She says she hasn't been taught writing letters at childcare, but this concept of the 'tail' on the r she must be getting from somewhere unless it is just that the writing she sees at daycare is all written that way.

I do find the idea of an 'approved' script curious - we never had that in the UK - does that mean that peoples handwriting here is more uniform I wonder? Mine is pretty appalling, but has never been fantastic unless I was doing calligraphy or something but it wasn't too bad - just is appalling now due to lack of practice.

[Phteven]

Are you sure you never had an approved script in the UK?
It's not something that children think about but I assume that you would have been taught whatever your teachers were taught to teach when they were at teaching college. I never knew that there were approved fonts until I had to take DS1 to an OT.
A quick google for my own curiosity suggests that most schools have a handwriting policy to ensure uniformity across classes.

[wysiwyg]

I am fairly sure there wasn't when I was at school - I did some research and came across the following quotes if you google 'The acquisition of handwriting
in the UK - Tom Davis' you will find it - it is about the period I would have been at primary school 1981-1992. I do think I would remember maybe not the early years but if there was any concept of pen licences or similar and there being a standard for joined up writing as we called it.

In general what the project showed was this. Handwriting of UK citizens is, compared with that of those educated elsewhere in Europe or in America, very various. No uniformity is imposed centrally, at the governmental level, or locally, by Local Educational Authorities. There are several different handwriting systems to be found in the available copybooks, and each copybook may present its own version of the system it derives from. Individual schools may favour particular systems or particular copybooks, but often it is left to the individual teacher of handwriting to adopt whatever method they feel comfortable with.

this means is that diversity, rather than uniformity, is the rule. Diversity is also encouraged by modern theories of child-centred education, and by the belief that the style should be adapted to the individual child's abilities rather than that each child, whatever his or her skills, should aim to imitate the perfection of the model writing. Here even in our small sample practice varied considerably, from one end of the spectrum to another, but it is clear at least that diversity is to be expected rather than conformity. And the relative autonomy of the schools from the prescriptions of the LEA's further reinforces this general picture.

Things may well have changed now - my generation were taught very little about grammar and sentence construction, but things have swung the other way now (I think a lack of understanding about the structure of the English language is a barrier to learning other languages - so is good that the structure of the English language is being covered a little more now).