Sunday, January 24, 2010

Penmenship at toddler

Am I seeing that the "prophetic" act during Maximus's 1st birthday coming to reality? It's not usual of me for being supersitious or believing in the myths of cultures. But we carried out a Chinese culture on Maximus during his 1st birthday - picking up objects that will resemble him in the future. Yes, it sounded very mythical but it's just for fun sake and to continue on with the culture. The 1st object that he picked was a pen which it was supossed to represent his penmenship skill.
Now, after it's 2 months after his 1st birthday and we are seeing his interest in "writing". Each time when he gets hold of the pen or pencil, he will be sitting on the stool at the coffee table and starts with his "writing". He can spend a good span of attention in carrying out the task.
Of course I have never encourage writing at such young age and neither holding pencil or any writing tool because it's not in the milestone yet until later age. But I am surprise that Maximus is enjoying his "writing" activity (more on scribbling). The milestone in writing ability begins with scribbling (uncontrol scribble) anyway. So it's alright for him to just scribbling along. In addition, I am also not bothered to correct his method of holding the writing tool. It's more on the natural development and later will lead to nuturing him at the suitable age.
Looking at how Maximus enjoys using the writing tool to scribble is already the best! I am not expecting anything more...
I hope that most preschool especially in the pre-nursery (3 years) will not get the children started with holding any writing tool to write properly. I do wish that the mindset of parents to get children started writing at 3 years to change. Besides giving them the handwriting activities, there are better sensorial and eye-hand coordination activities. Handwriting ability will start when the activities have been done develomentally appropriate. Teachers should be able to equip themselves with the knowledge.
I recalled giving the Pre-Nursery and Nursery teachers from a chain of preschool an actual hands-on activities that enable them to relate to giving the 3/4 years old writing activities before acheiving their milestone. The training topic "Using Multi-sensory Technique to prepare for handwriting ability" was an eye-opener to most of the teachers.
So, I do want to also practise what I preached. Therefore even my Maximus is enjoying his initial "penmenship" activity, I will allow it to develop naturally then.

Trying to imitate to scribble the picture and then talk about what he has scribbled!

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