First writing exercise at home...

Little Renzo is almost 3 years and 2 months old, and for the past 1 year, he did hit quite a few milestones and I was just running through his progress (especially academic progress) in my mind, and realized that it's time to reinforce on his writing skills.

Since he turned 2, he has mastered all his alphabets and phonic sounds of single letters, and slowly he grasped a bit of first and last sound concept, and he's able to count from one to hundreds. And in recent months, he started reading along with Daddy, be it by memorizing the words, or by pronouncing with phonic sounds, he is able to read some simple words or sight words such as "at", "you", "are", "the", "and", "cat", "map", "game", "note", etc.. He's pretty good with his first and last sound but not the middle sound yet. Hence I planned to work on his middle sound training from now till he turns 4. But at the same time, I am a little concerned with his handwriting as his coloring work from school is not nicely done most of the time. So from last night, we decided to have Renzo work on his alphabet writing for about 10 - 15 minutes before his bedtime. He has been writing letters and numbers on and off before, especially with his finger on his daddy ipad, but it is just not his daily routine in the past. And let's just face the fact (not the excuse) that boys are slow in their fine motor skill development so being able to hold a pencil and write properly, is just something I never expect Renzo to do at this age.

As it's a very last minute decision, we did not prepare "training materials", like letter tracing books. Well he has quite a few of them but all of them come with colorful pictures which I find quite distracting to certain extend. Hence we used a plain piece of A4 paper for the night, before I could grab any exercise book for Renzo from bookstore on the following day.

We started him with a bit of coloring to get him warmed up and comfortable before we moved on to the actual writing exercise. Renzo was not too excited but definitely did not show any sign of frustration during the entire 15 minutes session. But it did took him quite a while to figure out the fact that he is supposed to "WRITE" but not "DRAW" a letter A.

Renzo's first attempt on his own to write letter A - he almost drew it out.. But considering he's "drawing" from his memory without referring to any example, that's a good try!

Daddy wrote a few "A"s and asked him to follow and these are what we got, apparently he was trying to draw a semi circle..

I drew 5 dots and asked Renzo to link them up to form an "A", thought that's a pretty easy method till I caught him "coloring" that dot -_-!!..

Then I changed my strategy and asked him to link the numbers from 1 to 2, 1 to 3 then 4 to 5, not to my surprise, he has stronger interest in numbers and he managed to follow my instruction much better..

Lastly he wrote this A with correct order of strokes, but just not enough strength.. 

Lastly, Daddy took over the coaching job and asked him to write a few more times till he finally completed the exercise by writing an A in the box on his own..

I looked at Renzo's school work, he has been tracing letters and numbers but there's no real independent writing yet. To me there is a slight difference because tracing is rather easy for kids at this age as long as the could follow the dotted lines. Whereas writing on their own means they really need to memorize how the letter/number looks, and writing the strokes in correct order is quite a challenge to them. Let's just see how much he could improve in the next 10 months, as he will be required to start spelling in school during K1 which is just less than 2 years from now!!