Which is what I scream in my head when my daughter tells me she hates to write.  What??!!  Perhaps my love for penmanship is a tad obsessive.  Whatever.

But come on, hate?  That is a strong word afterall.

Where do I go from here? I don’t want her to be forever scarred when it comes to handwriting.

I know, today is the “electronic age” and who writes letters anyways?  I think about it but never do. That’s beside the point.  I do, however, write plenty of to-do lists, grocery lists, quick notes to husband, take notes during family worship and Bible study. So see handwriting is still a big part of our lives.

This is what I have noticed.  I like to give Haley a handwriting assignment so I can go do something that “needs” to be done.  When I do this her performance is always sub-par.  The beginning of a sentence is never capitalized, words she knows how to spell are misspelled, spacing is way off and letter height is varied.

On the other hand, if I stop being such a multi-tasker selfish teacher/mommy and sit with her, the mistakes are drastically less.  Hmmmm… looks like the solution is quite obvious.  But, I do feel that children should learn self-discipline.  Afterall, we as adults don’t have someone constantly looking over our shoulder.

And I also want to encourage the awareness of the ever-present Father.  He is always watching and we are to perform to the highest standards even when “no one” is watching.

Boy, was that hard to cough out.  I really should swallow my own clever blog advice.

There have been tears (and as you probably know with a 7 year old girl that means BIG tears) when I explain to her that she needs to redo something.  It breaks my heart. Thankfully, my husband works from home so he is there to support my decisions and Haley listens very well to daddy. 

After the onslaught of tears this is what we did to help Haley. I got myself a piece of primer handwriting paper and wrote the letters WITH her. Every letter. We started back at square one.  And you know what? She loved it!

Then we transitioned into writing summary statements (I stopped writing at the letters and just encouraged). Her spacing was just what I wanted as was the letter heights.  And she spelled correctly. I then gave her a sentence to copy and went to do something that “needed” to be done.  Although not as well done as it had been when I was there, it was still improved.

The hardest thing for me is remembering that she is only 7.  That’s hard to do when she can explain election, sovereignty and providence to you quite easily