Handwriting are lines important at 5?

[a27mom]

Ok, my just turned 5 y/o taught herself most of her capital letters when she was 3. Most of them she is proficient with, a few are recognizable but need work. She also can do several lower case letters. She loves to write letters, but becomes extremely frustrated when she has to write between lines. So the handwriting without tears workbook for lowercase is becoming a battle. No tears but lots of whining

 

Now she can write somewhat uniform sized letters, she is just a perfectionist and becomes frustrated if hers don't look exactly like the example or are a millimeter or so off from the line etc...

 

Are the lines important? She much prefers to practice on her white board. She doesn't even mind writing on 1 line? Good or Bad idea to scrap the workbook for now and just use the whiteboard?

[2smartones]

Maybe confining the letters to a specific space and learning to form the letters at the same time is too much. Try teaching the letter formation without lines, and then transfer that skill into lines later. For letters she already knows, she should be starting to put them in lines. (Notice I said "starting to", not "proficient at". ;) )

[Tracy]

Some kids just need handwriting to be a much more gradual process. My dd7 learned to write at 3yo, and that transferred almost immediately to writing on lined paper. My ds4.5, however, has needed much smaller steps. We started with finger tracing letters. Then we moved to the salt box. He has recently started to write on the white board, but if I put lines on it, it is just too hard for him. So I will not put the lines on the white board until he is comfortable writing without them. And we will start with just a baseline first and later move to the top and midlines.

[ebunny]

Ok, my just turned 5 y/o taught herself most of her capital letters when she was 3. Most of them she is proficient with, a few are recognizable but need work. She also can do several lower case letters. She loves to write letters, but becomes extremely frustrated when she has to write between lines. So the handwriting without tears workbook for lowercase is becoming a battle. No tears but lots of whining

 

Now she can write somewhat uniform sized letters, she is just a perfectionist and becomes frustrated if hers don't look exactly like the example or are a millimeter or so off from the line etc...

 

Are the lines important? She much prefers to practice on her white board. She doesn't even mind writing on 1 line? Good or Bad idea to scrap the workbook for now and just use the whiteboard?

 

 

The lines are important because, as you mentioned, they encourage uniform letters.

If she gets too frustrated...how about reducing the amount she writes, instead of changing the medium. Maybe one line a day, everyday?

 

FWIW, I do know exactly what you're going through and you have my sympathies. My perfectionist DD with superior motor skills took over a year and some months to get proficient at cursive. It is tough to build and maintain good handwriting. But, I can assure you that the effort pays off.

[Tanikit]

My nearly 5 year old only started writing about 9 months ago. She is still not writing in lines most of the time as a few months ago when she tried it she managed to do it very neatly but it took so much concentration from her that I was worried it would become unpleasant for her so we switched to doing a few other things:

 

I started working on writing ON a single line - learning to make p, q, j etc go under the line and also making her write so the bottom of the letters stood on the line (as she was a bit all over the place) I have also gradually started making her write on a single line but the lines are placed closer together which is causing her to write smaller and more uniformly.

 

We will move to writing in lines probably only next year when she is 5yrs 3mnths old and I will start with very little writing like that (probably just one word at a time at first) I think you have to evaluate how good your child's fine motor skills are, how much they can cope with and also how much strain it is putting on other things.