Learning how to write is an enticing goal for those making their way through the Primary classroom. It can also be daunting, frustrating, exciting, joyful, tricky, relaxing, and many more emotional adjectives.

Children are first often motivated to write their name. When they make a piece of artwork or finish something they can take home with them, they take pride in adding their signature to it. It may not always look like their name through our eyes, but they know what it says, and that’s what’s important.

As children begin to refine their phonetic awareness – identifying individual sounds in words- they make associations between letter sounds and symbols and movement towards spelling or “writing” simple phonetic words. This becomes a natural next step and is done for long periods of time without picking up a pencil or paper! Use of materials like the Moveable Alphabet become an approachable way to write.

Meanwhile, children are gaining valuable lessons in the mechanics of writing through exercises with materials on the Practical Life, Sensorial, and Art shelves. Chalk, dry erase markers, paintbrushes, crayons, and q-tips mimic holding a pencil.

These activities frequently require what’s known as the “pincer grip”, which is the strengthening of the index, middle finger, and thumb in preparation of holding a writing utensil.

Once a child feels comfortable using a pencil or colored pencil, the magic of tracing begins. One of the best materials designed in the Montessori classroom for handwriting is the Metal Insets. These are a series of thin metal geometric shapes with a thin metal inset they fit into. Children can trace both the shape and the inset. Special paper is cut and three colored pencils are chosen as the tracing tool. This promotes essential skills in hand control and lightness of touch on the paper. As the child continues to practice, more complex patterns are introduced that include specific “waves and lines” that imitate the motions of writing.

Maps and tracing paper can be seen out and in use on any given day in our classroom. The continent maps provide wonderful opportunities to practice these pre-writing skills from the pincer grip it takes to hold the puzzle piece by the knob, the careful tracing around the edges of each piece, to the final stages of coloring it in. Children get creative in their use of tracing. Have a favorite page in a book? Trace it! Want to spell North America? Trace it!

Our Kindergartens have had lots of practice in their years in the Primary classroom. They not only are prepared for the mechanics of writing with a proper grip and stamina, they can also begin to express their own thoughts on paper! Writing journals, map labels, “write the room” scavenger hunts, and more are now at their disposal. Different kinds of paper, lined and unlined, worksheets, and calendars all continue to give them opportunities to now refine their hand control, letter formation, and spelling. They begin to discover the complexities of what makes a sentence, which words describe something (adjectives), and which ones initiate a movement (verbs). And of course one of the greatest gifts of knowing how to do something, is helping others to do it too.

This is only a snapshot of the many ways writing is introduced in the Montessori curriculum. All of the learning areas in a Montessori environment have some element of direct and indirect preparation for writing that makes the process of putting that pencil to paper, smoother and more fun. I put “writing” in quotes because sometimes the best way to learn how to write, is to not write!