Homeschooling

Does he write in all-caps (many little kids do) or in lower case? For capital letters, it doesn't matter much. Most of the letters we write are lower case. If you are going to battle over the correct stroke order for better flow and more rapid writing, it's better to have the battle over lower case letters.

--Janet

A lot of kids start off forming letters however they can just because they want to write so badly. Since he's 3.5, it my be enough to just find a paper that shows the little arrows that point the proper direction. My youngest was that way and I just had to show him the correct way, and have something in print (a worksheet with the arrows) to back me up. He always needs proof. *lol* I'm not making htis up to be a pain, son.

As far as letting him continue as he is; that's a personal choice. It might cause problems eventually, especially with the flow of writing, but again your ds is still young. My oldest had trouble with writing letters from the bottom up. Some letters it seems more of a problem than others ( I gave up on the lower case *f* and he still writes it bottom to top). 

I have a HS friend who has a ds a year older than my youngest, and she still lets him write however he wants. It is painful to me to watch him write. He's very bright, but his writing looks like a preschooler. I think she's seriously considering a handwriting program to correct his formation. He's 8 now. She is paying more attention to how her youngest writes and he's doing fine.

 

http://messageboards.ivillage.com/iv-pphomeschool
http://pages.ivillage.com/cl-phacademy/

 

My daughter did that for a while, I think it's fairly normal and not a huge worry.  I found some paper at a teacher supply store that helped a lot.  It had large lines and on each line there were little clouds on top and little flowers on bottom.  You teach the child to start at the sky and write down to the flowers.  "Sky to ground" is how they described it. 

I'm going to age myself here, but I remember using Big Chief tablets and drawing grass under each line and then drawing a blue sky above, so I suppose you can do it yourself too!  I can remember being taught that we start in the sky and we can't draw in the grass.

I found a link, it's called smart start story paper, the picture is tiny but gives you an idea I hope:

http://www.teachershack.com/store/product_info.php/cPath/0_4512/products_id/25120?osCsid=cb25a3d5ec1677fe8b1c5c3b2fdc0ad1