Learning to write letters and digits by hand in preschool

Ensuring that children learn to produce symbols by hand is a central aim of preschool educators because symbol production is fundamental to future learning activities in elementary school, such as writing letters to practice spelling and writing digits to practice math. The current work provides an analysis of symbol production in typically developing preschool children to assist educators in preparing students for success in elementary school. 37 preschool children completed a short battery of standard assessments followed by 6 weeks of practice producing letters or digits. A classification scheme was used to measure legibility and confusability for each symbol produced by each child for each practice week. At the beginning of the 6-week period, preschool children produced some symbols well (letters: E, H, I, O, T, digits: 1, 0) and productions of Z were by far the least recognizable and often resembled S. During the 6-week period, productions of H, R, S, Y, and Z improved more than other symbols. Finally, visual-motor, literacy, and phonological skills interacted to predict production learning during the 6-week period, even after controlling for pre-practice production ability, age, and sex: scores on each assessment positively predicted production learning but only when scores on the other two assessments were low. Efforts to ensure that children enter elementary school with strong symbol production abilities may benefit from allotting more attention to some letters relative to others and, furthermore, that visual-motor, literacy, and phonological skills may be early predictors of preschool production learning.