With El having pen pals, I observed closely in ages how he wrote. When he was very young in N1, he would write gibberish, or sometimes nonsense words with random letters put together. As he became older, he wrote words, sometimes with the right spelling, but sometimes with errors in his spelling.
I gave him a piece of blank paper. I had first noticed that some of his words had a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters. He had no punctuation. Some of the words had no spacing in between them. His lines also leaned down. Some words he had no problems with were spelled wrongly, with some letters mixed up.
I did not think this was much of a concern, until I saw his school work, which had the same issues. His teacher corrected him, writing the words in the lower cases below the words.
Is this an area of concern? Do they outgrow them. Being the anxious mother, I went to google the problem. Some websites said that it could be dysgraphia. One suggested getting raised lines so that it would keep the children writing inside the lines.
Another said they would grow out of this issue. My forum friends told me their children were having the same problem, and one said her older child outgrew this.
When I told my mother about this, she said I had problems with ‘b’ and ‘d’ in Primary One. I do not really remember that since I tend to get full marks for weekly spelling tests. I do remember once when I was marked wrong for writing ‘gray’ instead of ‘grey’, since we use British spelling.
I do not have major problems with reading in general. I am a speed reader, in fact. However, there are occasions when a simple word looks strange to me and I have problems understanding it. It does not happen frequently to me but it gives me a strange sense of displacement. Occasionally, I would look at a word and think it looks strange. That occurs with some words, and happens in the classroom when I am writing on the whiteboard. I cannot imagine if I have to face this problem on a regular basis. The alternative worlds that books provide would be lost to me.
