Penpals Handwriting

At Kinderley we believe that clear handwriting is as important as the spoken language. A flexible, fluent and legible handwriting style empowers children to write with confidence and creativity. It helps with spelling, aids fluency in their writing, and creates a good first impression.

Handwriting is a developmental process, that begins before school with a basic pencil grip, marking and making shapes. Children are then taught, through a series of developmental steps, to link letters thus forming words and sentences.

At Kinderley, we follow the ‘Penpal’ Handwriting scheme, which offers a practical approach in the development of handwriting. Using continuous provision, each stage builds upon the previous one, reinforcing and evolving the child’s handwriting style.

The basic stages of development are:

Foundation Stage

Develop both gross and fine motor skills through making patterns. This leads into forming letters accurately, starting from the correct point.

Year 1

 Children learn to correctly form their letters, when this is achieved, they begin to join some letters. dddddddd

Year 2

 Children consolidate their letter formation, moving on to learning the basic joins.

Year 3 and Year 4

 During Years 3 and 4, children are introduced to the idea of joining most of the letters in a word and to trickier joins such as joining from ‘r’, ‘s’ and ‘f’.

Year 5

Writing with fluency focussing on issues of proportion, size, legibility and different styles for different purposes.

Year 6

 Children will develop a personal, fast, fluent and legible handwriting style of their own, consolidating and building upon the previous stages of learning.

For a more detailed view of handwriting progression, please see the attached document CLICK HERE