Pomme wants to learn to write.  She’s already shown that she knows how to draw letter ‘i’ and ‘m’ and ‘o’ and ‘c’, which she figured out with no instruction.  A few minutes ago, she was tracing Flipper’s handwriting exercises with her fingers, so I asked her if she’d like to do a writing page herself.

Oh yes, she said.  She was very keen.  Normally 3 years old is kind of early to do this (kind of???) but she is keen and is very advanced with her fine-motor coordination and drawing skills.  For one thing, her pencil grip is “correct”, unlike her older brother’s!

So I printed out the first lesson page from Penny Gardner’s “Italics: Beautiful Handwriting For Children,” which teaches letters i, j, and l.  She already knows ‘i’, the trick here would be doing it with control, starting and stopping on the lines.  Honestly, I wasn’t sure if she would be ready for this, but she wanted to try it.

So I went over the instructions with her… “start at the waist line, go straight down to the base line and stop, then go back up and put the dot.  Always make sure you start at the waist line and go down.”  I demonstrated tracing the models, and then she traced them with my guidance.  Then she had to do some on her own.

The first one was perfect, all by herself!  The next one, she started at the bottom and went up.  Oh, but she noticed right away what she had done!  She smiled and said “Whoops!!!  That one was upside-down!”

Then she did the thing that made it super-cute.  Since she had drawn the line bottom-to-top instead of top-to-bottom, she put the dot below the line instead of above it, making the whole letter upside-down.  Then she laughed uproariously.

Anyway, she then proceeded to fill the whole row with beautiful i’s.  Some went well below the base line, some had slashes instead of dots, but on the whole it was very well done!  They weren’t just random, she was trying to be careful and correct.  Not at all bad for a 3-year-old!

Then she took my credit card, which happened to be on the desk, and proceeded to ‘swipe’ it along the path made by the waist and base lines.  She’s a born little shopper, I think.

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