From Mirror-Writing to Rainbow-Writing

Oh, the trials of a left-handed child. Unless your parents/teachers are left-handed, too, every darn thing is modeled with the wrong hand. Cutting is harder, writing is harder (lower-case a, how does a leftie ever write you?), and I do not even know what I'm going to do when Willow is ready to learn to knit.

Mirror-writing is still developmentally appropriate at this age, but it's also developmentally appropriate to be moving past it by now, and since Willow is beginning to be able to read a little, and clearly knows which way words move across the page, I've been just pointing it out to her when she writes backwards, and very occasionally, usually when she's written a word that she's memorized or when she's written a word that needs to be accessible to other people (cards to grandmas, name on her Summer Reading Program chart), asking her to correct something. Since Willow writes so much, what I don't want is for her to internalize mirror-writing--that would be harder to unlearn (some people theorize that Leonardo Da Vinci engaged in mirror-writing secretly because he was a (gasp!) leftie).

Montessori has a lot of moveable letters and moveable words, and one thing that I think Will's been doing when she copies is to put the word on her right side (of course!), and then mirror-writing is very natural--it's much more difficult to figure out how to copy a word going the correct way when the word is on one side of you or another. We're going to have that problem here, too, perhaps, because one of our projects this coming week is to write some sight words to label everything in the house. But one thing that's been working so far, especially with unfamiliar words, is to have Willow put the word above her paper--it's easier to line it up and follow the correct order when she's copying the word directly below its model.

Another thing that works for words that are more familiar to her, and that thus she's a little more used to mirror-writing, perhaps, is to make a game in which I write the word with each letter a different color, and then challenge her to copy it. Hence Willow's favorite word of all time:
Not bad. And besides, everyone knows that N is the bugbear of the alphabet.