Earlycare Handwriting Academy, Uyo.

Barbing salon or Barber shop ?

There is a barbing salon close to our house. ❌
There is a barber shop close to our house. ✅

👌🏾👇
The place where people go to have a hair cut is a barber shop or the barber's.

Do not call it a 'barber salon'. If you do so, your English teacher will not be happy with you.

However, the place where people, especially women receive hair and beauty treatment is called a hair dressing salon or a beauty salon.

Did you learn?

🌟✨ Idiom of the Day ✨🌟

You can’t judge a book by its cover.

💡 You should not judge someone or something only by appearance.

📌
• He may look quiet, but you can’t judge a book by its cover.
• The restaurant looked small, but the food was amazing — you really can’t judge a book by its cover.

📝 Syn: Don’t judge by appearance
📝 Ant: Judge superficially

❓Have you ever realized you can’t judge a book by its cover?

Should we teach continuous cursive (every letter in a word is joined) handwriting?

No. The perceived wisdom is that keeping each letter separate and simple when learning to handwrite is best. Once children have learned the individual letters, they can be taught to join them together.

N.B. The British Dyslexia Association recommend that children with dyslexia learn to write using continuous cursive handwriting.

What font should I teach?

To secure the best possible handwriting teaching across a school, everyone should be teaching the same font (letter shapes and style). The simplest letterforms that have no curls or flourishes are the best for children to learn. Letters that naturally have an exit flick, for e.g. a and e, should be taught with the exit flicks.

There is no requirement for copperplate or calligraphy – keeping it simple is best. Don’t forget to display your font in any classrooms or spaces where children and adults will be writing.

Children generally learn to walk before they can write or scribble.

Make a small circle. Go to the right side and go straight down with a little flick.
This is how letter a is formed.

Start at the top. Go down left, go down right, then make a line across the middle.

This is how letter A is formed.

Handwriting Policy for left-handers.
Check comments section.

A liaison between primary schools in the same area can also be a great help. Not only can they produce a uniform policy that will benefit their pupils, but they can also pool resources, such as in-service training sessions and learn from each other’s experiences. If primary and secondary schools were to meet occasionally, there could be even greater benefits. Feedback can be available to junior schools to show any difficulties that their own (ex)pupils are having in dealing with the speed, pressure and new priorities in secondary schools. A positive consequence may be modifications in the policy for top juniors, with more emphasis on speed to prepare them for the changeover. Together, the schools can discuss the real problem: that unless pupils have learned the correct movement of basic letters, it is inadvisable for them to be encouraged to join up their writing. At whatever stage basic movement faults are detected, they must be dealt with, but teachers must also be aware that determining the rights and wrongs of personal movement between letters is not so straightforward. Many personal joins remain perfectly legible and enable pupils to speed up their writing. All of these points point to the need for teachers of all subjects to be more informed about handwriting.

When it comes to the first year at school, parents need to understand that the emphasis on the movement of writing means that the handwriting may not appear as neat as their older children’s print script did. The children will be better off in the end as they have plenty of time to refine their writing without having to alter their letters.

If you decide to allow children to start joining their letters as soon as appropriate, then again, an explanation will be needed. Parents who themselves may never have been taught to join can respond by claiming that this emphasis on handwriting is repressive. They need an explanation that your skill lessons are not reverting to old-fashioned ideas, but are making life easier for their children in the long term. As parents begin to understand how important it is for children to have adequate writing and how difficult it is for them when they begin, those same parents will start to realise the part that they might play in helping their pre-school children. In the developed world, young children are given fewer and fewer real tasks to perform before they go to school. Their hand-eye coordination is not developed, nor is the important discrimination that is needed to recognise or reproduce details of letters.

Television may widen children’s general knowledge, but it does not give them the foundation for accurate skills. Parents who realise this can do so much to help their children by playing all the tried and tested old-fashioned games that develop these faculties, and by giving time to help pre-school children with real tasks around the home or garden.