In my last blog, I addressed reading as not a natural process, that it must be systematically taught, practiced daily, and is only mastered with a great deal of time, energy, and patience on everyone’s part. In that same blog, I detailed how the brain accesses different lobes responsible for specific skills and how the different areas of the brain coordinate efforts to allow the processing of learning to read.
This week’s blog involves the complexity of the human brain and its functions in learning to write. I took inspiration from a lesson I shared with four of my favorite preschoolers, ages two through four. We gathered around their classroom table, they on their child-sized chairs, me on my knees, to practice writing their names. Each child gripped their pencil in a different way; none of them knew where to start. It was up to me to guide their fingers around the pencil in proper pencil grip style (yes, pencil grip matters) and help them feel the press of the pencil’s lead onto the paper. Up and down we went as I said each letter to form their name. Mind you, these children are not yet reading and do not yet know all the letters of the alphabet. That too is a work in progress.
Like reading, the distinctly human ability to write, is not a natural process. Holding a pencil or pen and writing one’s name is a complicated process that not only uses the muscles in the hands to manipulate the pencil as the tool, writing requires several areas of the brain to work together, simultaneously or alternately. Like reading, writing must be systematically taught, practiced daily, and mastered before fluency is attained.
As the body’s command center, the brain is highly organized. Scientists have determined the brain to have dedicated areas responsible for specific tasks. These areas are called lobes. The brain’s lobes work together to coordinate our every thought, every feeling, and most of our body’s actions. The coordination of each task is communicated from lobe to lobe via the synapses, or spaces, between the lobes. All this to say, that when a child grips a pencil and writes letters on paper, the child is using not only the muscles in their tiny hands, they are using several areas of their brain.
When a child handwrites the letters of the alphabet, they use the cerebellum portion of their brain. Located at the base of their brain, the cerebellum is responsible for motor coordination and muscle control. As the cerebellum coordinates the grip of the pencil and movement along the paper, the occipital lobe, also at the back of the brain and located just above the cerebellum, is triggered to allow the child to process and interpret the visual information of the letters being written. Handwriting letters allows for more brain engagement allowing letter recognition and differentiation with greater comprehension capacity than simply looking at the letters and saying them.
At the same time, the temporal lobe, located behind the forehead temples, coordinates the processing of sound and memory. Saying the letters to your child as they write, triggers the temporal lobe for memory of the letter’s name and sound. Within the temporal lobe a section known as Wernicke’s area is responsible for language comprehension and processing, both the spoken and the written. This important area converts the auditory signals into meaningful words for proper grammar and syntax.
With practice and maturity, a child’s frontal lobe, located just above their eyes, has processed all the child has been exposed to. And the brain doesn’t forget. The frontal lobe’s job is to enable comprehensive reasoning, detailed planning, and sensory integration. With these skills mastered, a child becomes fully fluent in writing.
Writing engages the brain with the written word long before reading can happen. When we write we engage the brain with several tasks at once and each task comes from a different part of our brain. Consider writing as another workout for your brain and like muscles, brains grow stronger and healthier with exercise. Surprisingly, writing comes before reading, making reading instruction more efficient.
Take the next steps to teach your child to write. Start when they can sit at a table and follow your directions. My experience proves two years of age to be appropriate. Stock up on old school pencils, buy a pencil sharpener and plenty of paper. Give your child a pencil (no crayons please, crayons are for creating art, not writing), give them a piece of paper (in the beginning any kind will do) and sit with them for writing time. Guide their small hands into a proper pencil grip and show them how to write each letter as you say it. No, it won’t be pretty. They letters will not always look like they should, in fact, words may be illegible in the beginning. Still, celebrate every letter and word then bring in the crayons to add a picture to their writing. With daily practice and gentle reminders from you, your child will learn their letters long before they can read them.
–SARA
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