Episode 353- Handwriting: The Missing Link in Early Literacy with Holly Britton

If your child can talk for days but freezes the moment a pencil hits paper, the problem might not be “motivation” or “attention.” It might be handwriting. We sit down with educator and curriculum designer Holly Britton, founder of Squiggle Squad, to unpack why handwriting instruction is a core building block for literacy, written expression, and confident learning, especially in the early elementary years. 

We get specific about what handwriting really is: a transcription skill that has to become automatic so kids can use their brain power for planning, organizing, and revising. Holly explains how fine motor skills and cognitive language skills develop together, why the brain treats writing-by-hand differently than speaking, and how overlapping literacy systems make handwriting more than a nice-to-have. We also talk directionality and why early motor patterns can lock in for years, plus a practical example that can help prevent b and d reversals by teaching consistent start points. 

Then we zoom out to what developmentally appropriate learning looks like. Holly shares the Squiggle Squad approach of teaching a small set of pre-writing strokes first through gross motor play and finger tracing, before asking young kids to form letters on paper. We also tackle a real classroom issue: kids rarely see adults handwrite anymore, and screen-based “handwriting” demos often fail to model the actual tool, grip, and movement children need to copy. 

If you care about early literacy, child development, fine motor skills, and practical handwriting tips for parents and teachers, you’ll leave with clear next steps and a simple chalk challenge you can do today. Subscribe, share this with a parent or educator, and leave a review with your biggest handwriting question so we can cover it next.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

unknown 0:00

There we go.

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hi, welcome to the SJ Child Show today. I am so excited. This conversation has already been so wonderful. And I think you're gonna have so much to take away from this today, listeners. A lot of value, resources, services if you're needing them. And we'll get into all of that in just a minute. I'm so happy to welcome Holly Britton. Hopefully that's all spelled, you know, pronounced correctly and with my phonetic ways. Nice to meet you. Yeah, so nice to be here. Thank you. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Give us an introduction, and then we'll get into why you're here.

From Homeschooling To Public Schools

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Well, thanks again for having me. Hi to the audience. If they're the if this is your first time hearing me, I'll just tell you a tiny bit about how I got back and got into education and then where I am right now. So my first forays into the education world as a teacher was as a homeschooling mom. I had originally planned to become an equine vet. That's what I went to school to do. That was what I had hoped to do. And then, as life does, throws you curveballs, the path radically changed, namely, I had children. I think a lot of people can relate to that. So I can't say I regret any of the changes. I still get my horses, but I also have four beautiful children that I was blessed to educate myself and learned so, so much in the process. About the time that my kids were going off to college, my youngers were still at home. The last one in the house ended up going to a private local private school. And that's where I started teaching because I had planned to teach him longer, but without any other kids at home and a lot of his friends going into public schools, we just pivoted. So I became a classroom teacher at that point. I was teaching in an English class and absolutely loved it. From there, I went into admin. I did some curriculum reconstructing of their curriculum and then some kindergarten coaching. Later, I had gone through my master's and my public school credentialing program and was teaching at a local public school when COVID hit. So I was in third, fourth, and fifth grade. At that point, I'd had private school experience, some public school experience, and was starting to see some huge gaps in the academics of kids in the upper elementary school levels because they hadn't been given some of these things in the lower. So I was feeling like the foundational skills were not real strong, and I was having a hard time getting my students onto higher level learning skills. So long, long, long story shorter, I pulled out during COVID and I started a company called Squiggle Squad, which was an attempt to meet some of those foundational needs, namely through handwriting instruction. And that's because it seemed to be the piece of the literacy puzzle that was sorely missing and very obviously missing when I was teaching older older elementary school kids.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Yeah. And let's talk about some of the things that you were seeing so that people can understand what handwriting might, you know, what that might implicate in a child's like future for them.

Brain Science Behind Writing By Hand

SPEAKER_00 3:44

That is such a good question. I rarely get asked that, and it's really insightful because we sometimes look at kids writing and we think it's messy, but we don't attribute some of their learning problems to the fact that they cannot transcribe their thoughts. The thoughts they have in their head need to be visibly displayed, and you have to do that kinesthetically. You either do it through handwriting or you do it through typing. I am going to avoid the conversation about speech to text at this point. Suffice to say that it is radically different. The way your brain uses language and learns language is radically different when you speak it rather than write it. And I think it should go without saying that we desperately need to become literate people. You need reading and writing, not just talking. And so I'm gonna, that's maybe another podcast, but um but handwriting is the first transcription skill that we teach children. And it is in large part the easiest, it's the most accessible, and yet without explicit instruction, kids up the pipeline, let's say in second, third, and fourth grade, they're being asked to do heavy writing tasks that involve planning, organizing, revising. And those are higher-level thinking skills that if you don't have transcription skills automatized, you are gumming up the thinking process for writing. It needs to be automatic. And it's easiest taught when it's very when they're very young, because because relatively speaking, to make a straight line or a curve or eventually letters is appropriate, developmentally appropriate at younger younger ages. What we don't realize is that those motoric patterns, whether they're good motor patterns or bad, become become automatic for the kids. And if they are not properly taught, then they are laboring with excessive pencil lifts, repeated strokes, all of this slows down the writing process. And when you're you get to harder writing tasks, you need that writing process to be fast and easy and comfortable and ultimately legible. So all of that is taught at the younger years and practiced and mastered through many years. It's not finished in kindergarten and first grade. It needs to, and plus it's added on to. So then we get into cursive, we get into proper keyboarding, all of that becomes part of the older students' training. Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

And what about the because I like to kind of teach people what parts of the brain are we accessing when we're using handwriting? You know, when my like jumping in this strange story, when my stepdaughter was five, I think is when her husband her husband, my husband and I got married. Yeah, right. Um she struggled, and I found out at that time that she had never crawled, that she had scooted. And I had done some research. I was a medical paralegal, and I did a lot of research on a lot of things. And so one of those was her brain. And how can I help her? And how can I get this better? You know, what can I access for her? And one of the training was crawling, teach her to crawl, help her to understand and connect those left, those left-right brain connections to help, yeah, more of that. So, what do you think about that exercise and and kind of how that evolves?

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Yeah, that's wonderful. Well, I'm not a neurologist, but like you, when you're paralegal, um, you research is a big part of curriculum design and classroom instruction. Of course, we need to understand as best we can the neurology of what's going on in a little little one's brain so that we our our lessons are informed. And we don't have to be experts in this, but we do need to have a general understanding about child development and the way the brain processes thought and movement. It may help to think that transcription skills, specifically handwriting, are both physical and mechanical. And I'm sorry, physical and cognitive. So you've got the mechanical side of things where you physically have to have the dexterity, the the hand strength, the core strength to sit up at the table, eye hand coordination. You have to have that to be able to manipulate a writing instrument, but you also have to have cognitive knowledge, and that comes, excuse me, in learning language imprint. So we're learning the names of languages, we're learning the names of letters and the sounds of letters, and then how they go together to make words and words make sentence. So then you're looking at syntax, and weirdly enough, what's happening inside your brain is you're using all of your senses. So where it may be obvious that you see language when you read, even if it's not spoken out loud, the science shows us that the hearing language, the hearing centers of the brain are still hearing it in your head, which is why phonemic awareness is so important in reading and writing. And inside the brain, those regions that affect literacy are all overlapping. There's some that are isolated, that are used only, say in handwriting or only in reading, but so many of them are interconnected that it does it that we do well as practitioners to integrate all of those practices so that the all of those regions of the brain are being used so that understanding comes quicker and more clearly to the reader. So handwriting uniquely connects the kinesthetic part of the brain to the language centers, which is it is unique to handwriting. You can't do that by talking, you can't do that by reading. You physically, kinesthetically trace through letters that maps it uniquely into your brain.

Directionality And Motor Habits That Stick

SPEAKER_01 10:39

And I think that you know, we really learn and use, and all parents need to realize this practice, practice, practice. Like we have to practice, we have to ask our kids to practice, and we have to maybe practice with them. Maybe we find some writing, you know. We like to play Pictionary. I don't know if that could be considered, you know, any kind of uh handwriting or anything, but it just popped in my my brain that might be a good way to practice certain shapes of of you know penmanship or handwriting things like that. So I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Yeah, no, I think that's really creative. And I think the very best thing for reinforcement is finding integrations into regular life, yeah. Having said that, I will say that drawing a shape is very different than drawing a letter, and it needs to be emphasized that when a child starts to write, and by writing, I mean letters on paper connected to other letters that make words. So if you're just practicing, if you're if a really little, like a three, four-year-old, is learning, is learning what a letter shape is, and I see that shape on a paper and I call it a B, then writing it quote unquote properly is not as important because you're in a different stage of learning letters. But once you start writing your name, because that's usually where people start, it's really important to emphasize the directionality, the correct directionality that leads to efficient handwriting. And the biggest reason for that is that, and this is especially if your kids are in classrooms and they're going up with different teachers up the pipeline, because if you're mom, you might be able to approach this a little differently. But there's two things to keep in mind. One, we relegate, we as a culture in public school, and in large part because of common core, we relegate handwriting instruction to first grade and below. And it is almost never addressed up later. The exception would be some of these new people picking up cursive now, states picking up cursive, which is great. But but even then, those teachers have not necessarily been taught how to teach cursive, and some of those teachers don't even write cursive themselves. Yeah. So you're really depending on the curriculum. And the curriculum doesn't tell you if you're doing it wrong, it only says finish this worksheet. And so, unless you have somebody coaching you through it, who knows if your if your handwriting is going to become efficient and easy for you. So, two reasons to keep it, to keep to do it properly from the beginning. One is that that likely more handwriting coaching up the pipeline likely will not happen. And two, remember what we talked about earlier about motor patterns becoming automatic. So once you build a habit, it is very, very hard to train it, uh to retrain it. And just ask any teacher up the pipeline that's really frustrated with their kids' handwriting. They've got the bottom to top, they've got clockwise circles instead of counterclockwise circles, which are very important for that left-to-right flow. And if we don't train those two strokes in particular, we don't know why, but biology starts kids that way. We you put a pencil in their hand, most kids, is probably not true across the board, but most kids, you tell them to write something, excuse me, write a letter, and it's bottom to top, and it's clockwise instead of counterclockwise circle. And so from the very beginning, we need to reprogram that so that the practice is helping them improve as they move forward.

The Squiggle Squad Method Explained

SPEAKER_01 14:36

Let's talk about what the squiggle squad does. Where did it begin? And how do we implement and how do you implement services with people?

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Yeah, so squiggle squad was a very direct attempt to make handwriting instruction more developmentally appropriate because we have pushed it down. Used to in the good old days when we taught handwriting regularly all the way through high school, they didn't start handwriting instruction until the kids were six. And the dexterity and letter knowledge at the age of six compared to four is worlds of different. So those curriculums that start kids practicing handwriting by practicing letters somehow, I don't know, there's a lot to say about this, but very often because teachers are not getting instruction in teaching colleges how to teach handwriting, we depend on curriculum to teach us how to teach handwriting. But what the curriculum is teaching you is this is the letter H and the child needs to write it. And they might give you a start spot and they might give you an arrow. But when a child is three or four years old, they don't understand what a start spot is. They don't understand what an arrow is. So what we did with Squiggle Squad was we separated the motor skill from the letter learning to give those littles an opportunity to work first with gross motor skills, then to move down into finger tracing and more fine motor skills before we ask them to hold a pencil and write a letter, which is a lot more complex ask of a little baby brain, just uh you know, trying to accumulate the knowledge and understanding. So we pull that apart. The squiggle squat are five squiggles of squiggle friends. So we've got lines the lemur, which is a vertical line top to bottom, bubbles the bunny, curves the camel, slide the seal, and dash the duck. And of course, that is by design to engage kids because they feel safe with their friends, they love animals, and and then it gives the teacher a vernacular, some some ways of saying things that a child can relate to without putting in really hard vocabulary for them. So I'm not gonna tell a child I want them to make a three-year-old a counterclockwise circle up and around when they don't even know what a clock is. So instead, I'm gonna show them Bubbles the Bunny's favorite squiggle or favorite movement is this up and around, up and around. And they practice that first with their gross motor skills, then with finger tracing, and they do it over and over and over through different activities, through different muscle groups, through different mediums. By the time they get old enough, like their understanding now letters. Oh, this is an O, this is a letter O, or this is a letter D. Then the and later, as it all converges, the understanding begins to come together. The animals come together and play, and those strokes make letters and they make them efficiently in the proper direction so that the kids are not confused or weirded out because they they know what a letter A is, and they know bubble's the bunny and line's the lemur. So those two are just gonna play together and make this letter. So that's the premise uh behind Squiggle Squad. And for anybody that comes into the program, we have on-ramping training and PD for schools that adopt it.

Play-Based Skills Kids Actually Need

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Oh, wonderful! And that's so important too, to try to get it into the schools because it'll be used so more much more widely and so many more students available to be able to use it. Yeah, what a wonderful technique, too. And I couldn't agree more. The more we give our, you know, littlest ones the right tools. And my opinion, this is just my opinion, everyone. My opinion, I'm saying it again. I think school is started way too early. I think it's I think it's silly. I think that we need to like really back out and see if if adult brains aren't becoming adult brains until 25. What is their what is this huge gap of adolescence to adult? That's like, why isn't that where school is being filled? And those early childhood years are being used for practice, yeah. Skill building practices.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

Yes, yes. I mean, we already know this through science and through experience, through you know, years of of watching children develop. That if we just I like say, I like calling it playing with purpose or intentionality, you can teach a child to reach up and touch their toes, and they have no idea that it's a direction that's going to help them write the letter B later, you know, but it's developmentally appropriate, and it's still academic for a three-year-old, but that's what play is. It's it's brain training and and bodybuilding. You know, we we need kids to open and shut their hands. That's part of handwriting. We need kids to climb monkey bars that helps develop hand strength. We need them to be able to pinch because that's going to help them manipulate writing instruments. Why don't we just focus on that and know intentionally and intelligently that this is going towards their academic betterment?

SPEAKER_01 20:19

I think it would be so much better for all of society. Can just everyone listen to this podcast, please and teach?

SPEAKER_00 20:32

It's why people really gravitate, like moms and dads who know their babies gravitate towards things like Waldorf and Montessori because they know experientially that the kids are going to A, they're gonna love it, but they love it because it's developmentally appropriate. They love it because it's accessible to their understanding, and that's what makes those billions of neurons connect, and that's what creates the intrinsic excitement that comes with learning. And that's what we as parents want our kids to experience. We want, we always say we want them to love learning, but they're gonna hate it if you keep asking them to do things they're not, they're not developmentally ready for, or they're not, they haven't been, their their foundational skills haven't been built for it. So they may be old enough to learn something, but if they don't have the skill base or the knowledge base to learn it, it's still gonna be frustrating for them. So it, yeah, it really comes to down to this building level by level, skill by skill, and not being afraid to back up when they're missing a skill. You know, we say in squiggle all the time, we say break it down to build it up. You just you figure out where the problem is and then back way up. I used to have my junior high English kids bring in their favorite children's story. Book, and I'm talking like goodnight moon, like mostly picture books, and we use that to build story, and it they loved it because those books are easy for them, and I wanted it to be easy for them because I needed them to make connections that were going to be harder later.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

And I didn't want them to be scared of it.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

And so yeah, because when they come up against something that's difficult and that they get maybe even embarrassed that they don't understand, they want to go back to that. That feeling stays inside them when they come back to that and they say, No, I was embarrassed. I got my, you know, I don't want to do this again. I don't want to feel like that again. That is so important that we honor that that is a human experience. And it doesn't matter if it's a child, honor and give them dignity for that experience. And right, like teach them to maybe, you know, learn how to have their own conflict resolution within themselves for that those moments of embarrassment to maybe ask the teacher for clarification or pull them aside. And I mean, I'm trying to, you know, have my daughter like I want her to bring up every moment in her life that she needs that she has a question, that she feels indignified, that she has, you know, no, I don't agree. Like, I want you to say everything on your mind at all the times. Why not? Why not teach them to communicate everything? Everything.

Why Screens Fail At Modeling Handwriting

SPEAKER_00 23:32

And you're communicating so much more than that. You're communicating that you are a safe person for them to bring all that to. And teachers should be safe. Parents should be safe. And if they think that you're gonna throw something at them that's gonna hurt them or embarrass them or frustrate them, they will run. We are fight or flight. We are fight or flight. And that and you see that in in classrooms all the time and maybe in homes as well. And I think you touched on something else that I think is really important, uh, both earlier and just now, that when you come alongside somebody who's struggling and you model for them how to pull themselves out of the hole that they're in. They feel accompanied, they feel safe, and they feel capable because you're gonna take them through. Handwriting is so much like that. Uh just to swing back to handwriting real quick, you realize that our kids are not seeing people handwrite hardly at all. So in classrooms, there's no chalkboards, and there's rarely even whiteboards being used by hand because we have so many screens. And so when you go down to kindergarten, I it's very, very it's hard for me to see. Again, my opinion, people might get upset with me on this. I've had people get upset with me on this on social media. But when you use a computer screen to teach handwriting, you are not showing them a pencil, you are not showing them a hand, and you are not showing them paper. And then you're telling them to go back to the back corner and practice handwriting with a pencil and a paper by hand. I I it's just that's not the way kids learn. And we know that as teachers, we're taught in in teaching school, we are taught you model first, you model first, you model first. So I'd love to see us getting back. If you're gonna use a screen, why not use a projector where they can see a screen, paper, and a hand and a pencil? And I think that's a wonderful use of technology to be able to do that. But don't show a little robot and a letter H that's as tall as the child is, and then you know, pretend like somehow they're gonna understand how to write that on paper. But it's true of handwriting, but it's true of other things too. When you can break it down and then step in alongside them to give them the confidence that they need to build that skill, whatever it is, they're more likely to step into that learning space.

Chalk Practice Challenge And B-D Fix

SPEAKER_01 26:04

And you know, um, I keep thinking, what's a good summary activity I can give my listeners? I want to challenge my listeners to, and and you tell me whether this is gonna be maybe I should have asked you first whether go buy some chalk, go out and do some chalk and you know, have your kiddos follow along, write some alphabets down and let's see how many, how many alphabet pictures will people send me to see if they are listening and following along, right? And putting this in action because I think more than anything, the steps we take in action are the most important. Yes, we can all listen and we can all take this advice and da-da-da. But what are you gonna do about it? Yeah, what are you going to do about it? What are you like? Take some action, go get a thing of chalk for the summer and go write an alphabet, have your kids practice alongside of you, do their own. And I want pictures, everybody send them and we'll we'll pass them along.

SPEAKER_00 27:06

Would you like a letter formation guide to put in the show notes? Could you please? Yes. So, so parents and teachers, if you're doing this, please revisit how we teach kids directionally. Because I know as adults, we sort of choose our own ways, and that is okay. That is totally fine. But when you're instructing a child, instruction should be consistent for a long time. And then later the kiddo will will choose their own way, but get them doing it the right way properly because again, we want those motor patterns to become automatic so it feels natural, and we want those patterns to be efficient and legible. So just going back to classic formation and keeping it consistent for many years before you kind of let them go off the rails would be a resource on a website or anything we can we can use. Well, the the letter formation guide is inside of the kits that we sell, but I will I will give you guys one a PDF that you can download from the show notes. And and it's just again, it's just like your cheat sheet. Just go make sure a big one, and I'll just mention it because it's pretty commonly done incorrectly, is that BD. You know how a lot of kids reverse their B's and their D's. If you realize that, and a lot of your listeners are gonna say, of course that's how you do it, but some many, many were not taught properly. The lowercase letter D begins on the circle, so a counterclockwise circle up and down, and the letter B starts on the straight line. And that actually helps prevent reversals because if you start your D's on the circle, you're not if you start both of those at the top, then you come to that middle part and you're like, I don't know which way to go. And the kids, because their brain isn't developed entirely, they they have a mirror thing that happens neurologically, and so it's not a dyslexic thing necessarily from the beginning, it's just a brain development thing. But once they start getting confused, then they just guess every time they come. So if we start the D formation on the circle and the B formation on the straight line down, then you help to prevent that in many cases. Great advice. I love that. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 29:23

Tell me your website so that I can share that with everyone.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

Yeah, it's squigglesquad.com, www.squigglesquad.com. And you can find us on Instagram at squigglesquad handwriting. And I'd love to direct you guys to my sub stack because there is a lot more research that that is shared, long form writing. If you want to get a little bit deeper into the weeds as to why this is important as a transcription skill, so you can find me at my name, Holly Britain, or Holly on handwriting.

SPEAKER_01 29:56

I don't know what just happened there. I somehow got off of uh just happened. There we go. I was typing and then I hit something and it went to me. Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, listeners. This isn't sorry because that was crazy. Squigglesquad.com. That's where you're going to go to connect with Holly and the sub stack. I I love that. I think that that is is so fantastic. And thank you for the PDF. Yes, so my pleasure, my pleasure. Do it well. Exactly. Do it right, do it, and you know, just take your time to really connect with your kids. Realize that these skills are lifelong skills that you know, if if someday let's just say, you know, we have no more internet, do you want your children to be able to write and communicate? Are they going to be able to? Are they going to have loss of complete function because screens aren't working in if power goes out? So let's talk about teach our kids some skills that they can have forever because it's so important. And it's so important just for brain function in general.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

And yeah, I think it makes us it makes us better thinkers, yeah. It makes us better writers so we communicate our ideas more clearly. It makes us more creative and more expressive. I like to say that handwriting is human, so let's keep it human.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

I love that. Oh, that's a wonderful, wonderful way to to end this episode. This has been such a great topic and something that probably isn't spoken about enough. And thank you so much for coming on today and sharing with us. And I hope everyone takes advantage of this information and you know, just goes back and recognizes, even if you're an adult, obviously you're an adult if you're listening to this, go and practice your own handwriting adults. You know, make sure that you're really engaging in it. I keep lists and lists and lists. I mean, just lists everywhere all the time. I'm always writing. So I find it extremely cathartic and I can, you know, just out everything I need. And my husband always tells me, um, you know, if you haven't written that down, you're gonna forget about it. You better go write it down right now. And so it really helps me to get my whatever I need, thoughts, lists, calendar days, you know.

SPEAKER_00 32:36

That's so true. It's so true. And there's there's science behind that, there's a reason why we remember it when we write it down, even if we never read it again. And and it would be a shame for us not to give those same skills to our kids. That's that's for sure.

SPEAKER_01 32:49

Absolutely. Holly, thank you so much for your time today.

SPEAKER_00 32:54

It was so much fun. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

Yeah, and I really appreciate your resources and everything. So everybody, please go to squigglesquad.com and make sure that you get the resources. And if your child is struggling with handwriting, or even you know, your older child just doesn't have the skills that they may need to help them be better handwriters in their future, please go to squigglesquad.com and reach out to Holly um at the their I uh that's what I was typing, their Instagram page, uh Squigglesquad handwriting on on on Instagram, right? So please go visit those and support her. And yeah, it's been so nice to get to know you today. And I really look forward to staying in touch. Yes, me too. Let's connect. Thank you.