Dear parents here is a public service announcement from yours truly — once your child shows interest in holding a crayon and or pencil, there is no harm in teaching them letters. Start with the letters of their name and move on from there.

Now, while I say this, I don’t intend that two year olds should know how to write their name or to have interest in such things. However, each child is different. I can say for certain that one of my two year olds was writing her name and cutting out shapes at two and a half while another one of my children wasn’t doing so until age four. 

Here’s why I say this. If your child is interested in writing, go with it. Each school year will be made so much easier if they already have the notion of pencil grip and identifying letters. They will know how to use glue and scissors and be able to get right to work in kindergarten. 

As my mom would say, times have changed. When I was growing up my mom would never have thought of teaching me how to write my name before school started. While that’s okay for kids who aren’t developmentally ready for writing.

For those who are, there’s no reason learning how to, can’t be available to them. It just adds a little challenge to those early learners and gives them a bit of a head start for early school years.

Letter practice — Once your child shows interest you can introduce them to the first letter in their name. Capital letters are easier to learn how to write because they are a lot of straight lines. Once they master their name with capital letters, swiftly move to the first letter as a capital and the lower case letters for the rest of the name. This is how they will write it at school. 

Point out letters everywhere around you, to expose them to the idea that letters exist and have a purpose.

Practice holding markers, crayons, pencils, pens, white erase markers, chalk etc., with the proper pencil grip. Often with little ones start with fatter writing utensils moving your way up to smaller ones like pencils.

There are amazing programs online that you can use to print your child’s name out in dotted lines for them to trace. 

Wipe off books are also great practice tools for letter and number practice. Bonus, kids love using white erase markers and they are larger which helps form pencil grip.

Now if your child is approaching school age (three and a half years, four), you should start to have certain things available for them to explore safely. For instance, scissors and glue, many children start school without having had any experience using either one. Teachers have a whole program with showing them how to open the glue, roll up (or not) the glue, dots on their sheet to show them where the glue goes and so on. Exposing them to this skill earlier will be so helpful to them. The same holds true for scissors. Many parents are terrified of letting their kids use scissors — while this is definitely true, scissors unsupervised can end up costing clothing, hair or other beloved things. I do suggest that scissors are kept somewhere out of reach and only used with a parent until your child can be trusted to use them unsupervised. 

When you first take scissors out, you can start by having your child cut playdough, it is so rewarding to watch your child (mouth open — I don’t understand this phenomenon but watch and see for yourself how your child opens their mouth as they snip and focus on cutting all that playdough into tiny little pieces (haha). Focus on making sure their fingers are placed in the right hole when they are learning to cut. When you decide to introduce paper it is easiest to have them cut strips on the edge of their paper (kind of like grass). You can also have them practice cutting straight or zigzag lines on a sheet. From there they can move on to actual shapes. 

These skills although not necessary to learn before school, are definitely helpful to your child if they do. Any exposure is certainly better than none. Your child will thank you and so will your child’s first teachers.

Next week, I’m going to write about fine motor development, this is such an important topic for parents with small children and I hope to give you some tips and ideas on how to make this fun for your child. 

Until then, have a great week.