Developmental Writing Deep Dive: Part 3 Handwriting Pathways

You’ve read Part 1: Pencil Grip, you’ve tackled Part 2: Developmental Writing Pathways, so now your learner is ready to start writing their letters! But where do you start? Is it with the first page of a preschool writing workbook with the letters Aa? What if I told you it’s not…

Handwriting, just like all skills, is not something you can just jump in and start doing. You have to lay a foundation of skills, practice those skills, then try the big work (letter writing), and then practice that work. There’s a developmental sequence to the way we learn to write letters, and there are correct pathways for each letter, uppercase and lowercase, as well as the digits 0-9. Oftentimes these writing workbooks we find at the store or online are great practice. But they aren’t what we want to use to introduce and teach the skill. So, if you have those workbooks, tuck them away for a bit. Don’t toss them, they will have their time to shine, but not just yet. Instead we are going to print out the Handwriting Pathways resource and walk through each letter, step-by-step. We are going to learn the correct pathway, we are going to do ample scaffolded practice, and then, when we are feeling confident, we will practice our skills in those workbooks to build our fluency! 

Paper Position

Take a look at the paper position photos below for left and right handed learners. Make sure as the child is learning to write their papers are tilted the correct way and their arms, wrists, and hands are positioned appropriately as well. 

Letter Pathways

As we begin writing letters, we are going to start with uppercase letters. Yes, we will mostly use lowercase letters when we are writing words and sentences, however, uppercase letters have less complex pathways than lowercase letters, and many of them are written the exact same as their lowercase counterpart, just smaller. So by starting with uppercase, we are building students’ handwriting fluency skills using their developmental writing pathways, and giving them almost half their alphabet that they will just need to practice at a smaller scale when we dive into lowercase letters. Let’s take a look at each letter category that I like to group together when teaching handwriting. I have given each grouping a title, a general pathway, and then descriptions of those pathways. 

(When teaching Spanish characters, group them within the same letter formation groups that they are derived from). 

Handwriting is hard work, but going slow and steady in a developmentally appropriate sequence will set your learners up for success and writing fluency. Once these letter pathways have been introduced and practiced, then you can bust those workbooks back out to build rote memorization of the pathways and fluency! 

If you would like to get started with letter pathways, check out our Handwriting Pathways resource that has practice pages, in order of the developmental sequence, for all uppercase and lowercase English and Spanish characters and all digits 0-9. 

If you are in need of additional handwriting resources and practice, check out the Developmental Writing Resources in my shop! 

Just jumping in and feeling like your learners aren’t quite ready for letters and numbers yet?
Check out Part 1: Pencil Grip and Part 2: Developmental Writing Pathways