In our Montessori House classroom we distinguish between handwriting and word/sentence/paragraph building.   Handwriting is physical and requires the child to have fine-motor skills.  The “building” skills for words, etc. depends on cognitive development.  The physical skill and cognitive skills may develop at different rates.  Don’t worry now, these skills will all fall into place, usually by 3rd Grade.

This note is about handwriting:

1. Various aspects of  Handwriting: proper grip, pressure, shaping of letters and numbers, and placement of letters and numbers on lines.
2. Learning stages: Every child is different, and children learn various aspects of handwriting at different times. A very general outline of these stages can be found at at Understood.Org 
3. Upper case vs. lower case: If you are teaching your child to write his/her name, please teach it so that only the first letter is upper case, and the remaining letters are lower case.  Children should not be taught to write their names or words using all capital letters.  This is a bad habit that is difficult to break later on.  When they read books, they’ll start to see that most words are written in all lower case letters, and proper nouns (such as their names) are written with only the first letter being upper case.

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