Writing : teaching how to.

Teaching children to write must be fun, for both the parent and the child. The following quote from Professor David Elkind's book Miseducation explains why :

An abiding sense of attachment and a healthy sense of trust are fundamental to later healthy interpersonal relationships. A child who has learned to attach to and trust a parent has the basis for later attaching to and trusting friends and eventually a mate. But attachment and trust are also critical to learning. Freud recognized this fact when he argued that the "transference" (the patient's attachment to and trust in the therapist) is critical to the patient's readiness to change (learn) and profit from therapy. In the same way, many children learn to read in part because they are attached to and trust parents who are readers and who reward the child's progress in reading. As Dr. Spock says:

"Before they begin formal schooling, children can be strongly motivated to learn to read if they have parents who read to them. As they become intellectually capable of discriminating letter shapes, they may ask the names and sounds of letters. They will want to go to school unless alienated by bad experiences."

 Engaging in unnecessary cold interactions with infants in order to teach them some tricks such as recognizing words, pictures, or numbers from flash cards is miseducation. The child is put at risk for an impaired attachment and sense of mistrust. And because attachment is critical to later learning, the parent who engages an infant in cold interactions with the aim of giving the child an edge in academics may be doing just the opposite.

 Little children need to do lots of drawing to learn pencil skills before they can begin the trickier task of writing letters. However, please, please, please if you use colouring books don't insist that they have to colour in in the lines. This only stifles creativity, art is often very political and not necessarily neat. Putting up Alphabets on children's walls and magnet letters on the fridge is a good idea. Writing their name whilst playing, and telling them the letters of their name as you write helps them to grasp the idea that these shapes mean something.  And of course reading lots of books to them ( I read to my children every day - even into their late teens, and we still read together as a family). After some trial and error I found that using blackline masters of letters where the children can either trace over the letters or draw inside the lines of the letters (we are not doing art here, we are learning how to control a pencil) worked well. They just need lots of repetition and eventually they begin to remember what each letter is. I used a phonics approach to reading, i.e. A is for apple, B is for ball etc. I didn't teach them A = aye, B = bee until later. However, this could be done together. I would spend no longer than a few minutes teaching the child, then leave them to their own devices. Some of my children loved to laboriously spend hours on projects, such as drawing, and the others were happy to have the basics and then move on to another interest.