Ask HN : How to teach children to write fast? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN : How to teach children to write fast?

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People, What is the best way to teach children to write and read fast. My son, who is studying in primary, is little slow in his writing and he is not able to keep pace with teacher writing speed. He is having slight problem in his vision, suffering from spherical aberration.

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I'd say it's all about practise.

Through-out my life I've found that I get better/quicker or worse/slower at writing depending on how much I've been doing of it lately.

Working for home for the past two years purely on a computer, my writing looks terrible and I'm very slow.

Rather than traditional "practise makes perfect" methods used in classrooms (copying out lines etc.) I'd suggest that it's very important that what he is writing doesn't bore/anooy him. Obviously that's unavoidable in life, whether at school/work/other, but if he were to practise at home... if he enjoys what he's writing about, he's more likely to pay attention, care more, and therefore improve faster.

Currently, to make the writing interesting, I take short children stories and print it out on cursive font (dotted) and make him write over it and read it later, this is done as an time bound activity. I need to wait few more weeks to see the results of this exercise.

Not sure how old he is nor how advanced he is at writing, but my advice is that, as soon as he's ready, don't keep him just copying text.

Maybe find relatives/friends he can exchange letters with, get him to write a blog/diary kinda thing, get him to write about stuff that interests him.

I'll let others address your actual question of increasing speed, but I'd just like to make the [perhaps obvious] point that speed isn't everything. I'd argue that comprehension and composition (diction, logical structure, etc.) are more important than unqualified speed.

I second that. One of the drawback of writing slow, is that children often miss what's written on the board and unfortunately at times, teachers forget this.

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