alphabet reversal in 3.5 yr ld--need for worry? please help

[Princess5]

my 3.5 yr old daughter is showing great interest in writing letters. She goes to preschool 5 days a week for 2.5 hrs- montessori style. she is writing her C, S and G in reverse. she does start at top, but instead of curving to left in C curves to right. and so on for few letters. is it common at this age? i keep telling her to do correctly and she does correctly 1 of almost 5 tries. is that normal? i think she is too young and am not worried but my husband is worried about it. also one reason he thinks is that she still messes up her shoes and wears them on opposite legs more than 50% of the time. he is worried? should he be? please tell me your experience. i got some Handwriting Without Tears tools to work with her, but they are all so overwhelming, I dont know where to begin..

[Celia]

Relax. She'll probably reverse stuff for a couple years yet! It's normal. Model them correctly, and remember she's still just a preschooler! You really don't need any curriculum yet.

[chepyl]

Some kids mix letters up and reverse them until they are 6 or 7. Letters are hard. Don't push it. She is only 3.

[AdventureMoms]

My 4.5 yo still reverses several letters and always has her shoes on wrong. I lay out her shoes the right way and she still gets them backwards (crosses her legs when putting them on). She mixes up b and d and writes some letters straight-out backwards, when she can even remember how to write them at all. Also she writes her X tipped so it looks like a t. Her capital E often has 6 or 8 horizontal lines instead of 3.

 

She's 4. Yours is only 3. They don't get good at writing for awhile yet. When I was in preschool (age 4-5) I used to write upside-down and backwards at the same time. I didn't figure out left and right until like jr. high. It's very normal to do all kinds of crazy things when they're little. Just model correct writing and remind her which way to go (gently!). I wouldn't get worked up about stuff like that until at least 6 or 7.

[mommymilkies]

Seriously? She's 3!!!

[Starr]

She's doing very well. I wouldn't worry. Left and right can take a long time too.

[momma2three]

My bright 5yo reverses letters and puts her shoes on the wrong feet.

 

Your DH needs a reality check.

[KatA]

Seriously? She's 3!!!

 

:lol: I consider it a success if I can understand my son's complete verbal sentence.

[Petrichor]

My almost 3.5 yo DS can only write a really really long (as long as the piece of paper, lol) lowercase letter "l" and the upper portion of "S"

 

If she's still mixing up her letters 1/5th of the time at 6 or 7, then I'd say you might possibly want to worry. Otherwise? I don't even plan to formally teach my DS his letters until around 5.

[Petrichor]

Her capital E often has 6 or 8 horizontal lines instead of 3.

 

 

Too cute!

[beaners]

I wouldn't worry about it at all. What do you mean when you say you're telling her to do it correctly? I've found that my writers need a little help getting the correct motion to "stick" in their brain. I'll do something like have my daughter stick out a finger, and use that to trace the letter in its correct form on the table if she is having trouble.

[AdventureMoms]

Too cute!

 

She likes those horizontal lines! It only has 6 or 8 because I can usually stop her by then. Otherwise I think it would have as many as she could fit! It is cute, though!

[Petrichor]

She likes those horizontal lines! It only has 6 or 8 because I can usually stop her by then. Otherwise I think it would have as many as she could fit! It is cute, though!

 

The extra lines make it extra capital, I'm sure ;)

[sgo95]

My 6 yr old still reverses letters sometimes (her J's & 3's in particular). My youngest is 3 yrs 3 months and is eons away from wanting to learn, much less write the ABC's. Also, I wouldn't be worried at all about the shoe reversal. You are dealing with a 3 year old, you realize. This is part of what makes them so darling and precious! Tell your DH that he can take a :chillpill:. Your DD will be fine, truly.

[PeterPan]

You have to look at context, because reversals *by themselves* aren't shocking at this age. When I worked in K5 (that's with *5* yos, not 3 yos) we expected reversals at the beginning and wanted them gone by the end. However your dh is seeing other issues that reflect bilaterality problems. If you were to sit down and talk with someone who inventories development (developmental optometrist, OT, etc.), they would talk you through things. They'd definitely ask about the L/R issue. They would get her to do some things that require crossing the mid-line and see what happens. They'd ask about her development like *when* she crawled and *how* she crawled. All sorts of things.

 

So yes, it *could* be a sign of something, and the fact that she has L/R issues popping up in other areas in significant, not-age-typically amounts, enough that people notice, means it's something to watch. Go ahead and do some reading on bilaterality. It's always good to get a vision exam, preferably by a *developmental* optometrist, not a regular one. The dev. optometrist can do a regular exam but he'll screen for some extra things. Even at this age they can check tracking, convergence, focusing, all sorts of things. I got my ds checked a year ago, when he was barely 3, completely uncooperative, and still largely non-verbal. They could fully assess his developmental vision function, and that was just the cost of a normal visit ($60? I forget).

 

My dd had bilaterality issues btw. Yes that's how it presents. However it was part of a larger package of stuff going on, not *just* reversals in writing, if that makes sense. So just start doing some reading, get her eyes checked, look at developmental charts and see if there's anything *else* she's not age-typical on. If there's anything she shies away from or refuses to do (or does much MORE than normal), that's all significant. I definitely wouldn't blow off your dh's parent radar. He might actually be seeing something, and you might as well catch it now as later.

[CAMom]

My gifted son reversed a few letters until he was 6 or 7.

 

My very bright 7yo just reversed an "N" and a "2" today. :)

 

Totally normal. In fact, I would be shocked if a 3 year old always wrote letters and numbers perfectly.:)

[Sisyphus]

My youngest son is dyslexic, and he wasn't writing at 3.5 so letter reversals were not on my radar.:tongue_smilie: but, he had no dominant hand- the preschool teacher kept bugging me so I picked right since I am right. Years later his gymnastics and baseball coach kept asking what hand he was...none, lol. Also he could not differentiate shapes at all, and then of course a whole host of things related to spelling and reading. It's a lot more than reversals. This is probably nothing, at 3 there is no point worrying. Just keep an eye out maybe, but I hesitate to even recommend that, because 3 is so, so young!

[Maus]

I watched my little one with her shoes, and one day it dawned on me: she puts her shoes on the wrong feet because then that tricky strap is fastening on the part of her foot that's on top (and which she can reach easily) when she sits cross-legged on the floor to put them on.

 

And I heard a Human Development professor explain that children reverse letters clear up to about age 7 or 8 because, after all, everything else they've encountered retains its essential self no matter what angle it's viewed from. The family dog, for instance, is still the dog whether you look at his head, his tail, his tummy, his left side, or his right side. Why shouldn't that pesky 'b'?

[Ellie]

I wouldn't worry at all about that in a 3½yo, unless she has trouble in other areas regarding directionality, e.g., she moves left when you tell her to move right, KWIM?

 

It's possible that she hasn't been given enough specific instructions on which way to write her circles. That's one of the big "selling features" of Spalding and its look-alikes/spin-offs: children are given specific instructions on how to write their letters, including landmarks: circles begin at 2 on the clock, go up to 12, around to 9, down to 6, back up to 2.

 

You could hold her hand and guide her in the correct direction, multiple times, would be helpful.

[Forget-Me-Not]

My son wrote his entire name backwards at 4-ish and reversed a few letters until he was 6 or 7. He's 9 and he still sometimes has to pause and think about lower case 'b' and 'd'. My 7 yo still occasionally writes her 3s backward. I had a preschool teacher tell me it was confusing for them because we live in a predominantly right-handed world, yet we read and write from the left :)