In Reception we are continuing to learn letters and sounds. As they learn each letter, the children will be shown how to write the ‘grapheme’ (a way of writing down a sound or phoneme; graphemes can be made up of one letter like ‘p’ and ‘s’, two letters like ‘sh’ and ‘th’, three letters like ‘tch’ in a word like ‘catch’ or four letters like ‘ough’ in ‘dough’ or ‘cough’, where the same grapheme is used to represent two different sounds). You can download a guide to how we form our letters in the Help Your Child section on this website.
Remember that children need lots of practice with different activities to develop the muscles necessary for writing. When the muscles of the hand are weak, or when the fingers have not learnt to work together well, the child often compensates by using a poor or faulty pencil grip.
Here are some fun things to try at home to help your child develop these essential muscles:
Using an egg box, have your child hold 6-10 beans in their hand, and place them into the container one by one. Write a number inside each hole and ask your child to add the correct number of beans. This is also a great way to reinforce the concept of number. You could also have a race to see who can put five beans into each hole in the fastest time! The important thing is to do it one bean at a time.
Give your child a few coins to hold and ask them to push them one at a time through the slot in a money box. Make sure the coins are placed with the tips of the fingers, not the sides of the fingers.
Using Play Dough is great exercise for the fingers – try squashing, rolling, pounding and moulding with the hands, without using any cutters or other traditional Play Dough toys.
Other activities may include cutting with scissors, doing up buttons, tearing paper and picking up the pieces. Let your child help with the washing up and wring out the dishcloth!