Handwriting:

As highlighted in Strong Foundations, handwriting (as part of transcription) is a cognitive load. When children are still struggling with letter formation, spacing, grip, they have much less working memory available to focus on composition, sentence structure, vocabulary.

Early Years:

Children begin to develop their writing skills in the Nursery year through daily access to physical activity. Children are given plentiful opportunity to develop their gross motor skills; they are encouraged to run, climb, balance, throw, push, pull and swing their arms. Fine motor skills enable children to strengthen their hands and fingers, so that they can grip a pencil through activities such as: Dough Disco and ‘mark making skills’. The underpinning ethos for children in the Early Years is to reassure them that anything they create will be valued, whatever their level of skill. If children are going to be willing to take risks with their writing, practitioners need to encourage them to ‘have a go’. Before children are able to form letters, they need to learn how to make marks. They're working out how writing works, how to hold their pencil, what pressure to put on the paper and how to control the marks they make.

In Nursery, this begins with them making marks such as lines, circles and squiggles, and progresses to children, with adult guidance.

From the very start (Term 1 of Reception) the children will re-cap pre-writing skills, posture, pencil grip, movement patterns, before children are developmentally ready to form letters correctly.

KS1 Handwriting:

In KS1 the children will follow the Achieving Excellence in Handwriting KS1 programme. Children will begin with learning short, tall and tail lines as their warmups and then go through each section of the programme. Each lesson will be split into at least two sessions to ensure that children have the time to develop each letter formation. Children will not be taught how to join any letters until they have consistent, correct single letter formation.

KS2 Handwriting:

In KS2, the children will follow the KS2 programme of study in Achieving Excellence in Handwriting. They will begin with learning and practicing the short, tall and tail lines as well as the coat hanger formation. Children will recap the single letter formations before practicing them with joining lines. Each lesson of the programme will be split into at least 2 sessions to allow time to develop correct joins and confidence in writing. At Pyrcroft Grange, explicit, frequent and incremental teaching helps establish automaticity in transcription (handwriting + spelling). Once letter-formation and writing mechanics are automatic, children can focus more on content, style and editing. A sequential approach: start simple (grip, posture, letter formation) → build consistency and size/spacing → build fluency and speed → then focus on style (joined, efficient) and application across writing tasks.