Writing

In grade one, there is a lot of work on proper pencil grasp, developing those fine motor skills and hand muscles. There is also a HUGE focus on developing the oral French speaking language and proper sentence structures before expecting a lot of physical 'pencil and paper writing output'. If you think of how you learned the English language as a baby, you had to learn how to speak first long before anything else. We therefore spend A LOT of time simply practicing to speak to one another in both guided and spontaneous conversation! :) In French Immersion, our philosophy is "if you can speak it, you can write it and understand it!"

If you find your child is struggling with their fine motor skills, a great way to start may be to simply roll play-dough into letter shapes, or use tweezers to pick up small objects. Though activities such as these may seem like simply "playing" they do help to develop those hand and finger muscles. You might also sign yourself up as a teacher on the fantastic "teachers pay teachers website"(www.teacherspayteachers.com) and find a lot of tracing sheets to practice.

A good app that my son enjoyed very much may be "pinkfong tracing world" to help them build that "motor memory" and recall how each letter both uppercase and lowercase if formed properly always starting at the top to limit reversals.