My Prep class can trace every letter but can't write them
In the studies we have, writing a letter by hand helped young children recognise it better than typing it, and making the letter themselves, by copying it or printing it freehand, beat tracing over it. That's the short answer from a small but fairly consistent set of studies with children aged about three to seven. The keyboard and the tracing sheet both let a child skip the hard part, which is making the shape themselves. And once they've watched you form a letter, writing it from memory is the step to aim for.
One caveat before you forward this. The studies are small, the most quoted ones scan brains rather than measure classroom results, and the one closest to a real classroom found no pencil advantage for reading whole words. They're still plenty to plan a Prep handwriting block around.
What the studies compared
| Study | Children | Compared | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Longcamp et al. 2005 | 76, aged 3 to 5 | Copying letters by hand vs typing them, over three weeks | Only the older children who handwrote recognised more letters afterwards. |
| James & Engelhardt 2012 | 15, aged 4 to 5 | Printing freehand vs tracing vs typing | Seeing letters they had printed activated part of the brain's reading network. Traced or typed letters didn't. |
| Kersey & James 2013 | 7-year-olds | Each child wrote some new letters and watched an adult write others | Later, the brain's writing network responded only to the letters they had written themselves. |
| Mayer et al. 2020 | 145 kindergarten children in Germany, average age 5 years 10 months | Pencil vs tablet stylus vs keyboard, 28 sessions over 7 weeks | Four to five weeks after training, the pencil group's letter-recognition gains were larger than the keyboard group's. The stylus group didn't differ significantly from either. |
| Hirsch & Niedermeyer 1973 | About 50 Prep-age children, randomised | Copying vs faded tracing over 10 weeks | The children who copied did significantly better. |
| Askov & Greff 1975 | Not given in the published summary | Copying vs tracing practice | Copying scored significantly higher on a handwriting post-test. |
Mayer is the closest to a real classroom, and it keeps everyone honest. The pencil advantage was in letter recognition. On letter writing the groups didn't differ, the pencil and keyboard groups read and wrote whole words equally well, and the keyboard group beat the stylus group on words. The authors call the effects small.
Why tracing falls short
Tracing feels like the safe first step, and in plenty of Australian classrooms it is the first step. The NSW Department of Education's parent guide lists the steps: write over a highlighted letter with a start dot, then a letter outline, then a start dot on a line, then dotted lines.
The trouble is when it stops there. A child tracing a dotted a never has to work out where to start or which way to go, because the dots have done it for them. Both copying studies above found children did better when they had to make the letter themselves.
There's a second reason, from Li & James (2016). With 72 five-year-olds learning new symbols, what helped them sort the symbols into categories was seeing many varied versions of each. Freehand writing makes that variety for free. Tracing one fixed shape gives the same version every time. So a wobbly, lopsided a isn't a failed letter. It's part of how the letter gets learned.
England's writing framework (July 2025) goes further and warns that copying from the board, tracing dotted letters or practising without supervision can get in the way of children building a strong mental model of the movement. It cites no study for that line, so read it as expert opinion.
How strong is the evidence?
The newspaper versions oversell it, so be straight with staff and parents.
- The brain-imaging studies are tiny. James & Engelhardt scanned 15 children aged 4 to 5, each in one imaging session after one short training session. That's a small sample to hang a headline on.
- The study behind most "handwriting lights up the brain" headlines tested adults. Van der Weel & Van der Meer (2024) recorded the brain activity of 36 university students. It says little about a five-year-old.
- The classroom studies carry the weight. Longcamp, Mayer and the copying studies measure what children could do afterwards, and they point the same way: writing a letter by hand beat typing it for recognising letters, and making it beat tracing it for forming them.
The firmest finding is that teaching handwriting explicitly works. A meta-analysis by Santangelo & Graham (2016) found explicit handwriting instruction improved legibility (effect size 0.59) and fluency (0.63), while fine motor training without letters did next to nothing (0.10 and -0.07). Play dough and threading are lovely. They don't replace teaching the letters. Fluent letter formation also frees up working memory for spelling, part of why Year 1s read heart words before they can spell them.
What it looks like in Prep and Year 1
The routine is short, and it's the same I do, you do shape as the rest of explicit teaching (the Science of Reading, translated into your phonics block). Show the letter being formed, then the child writes it from memory.
- Model it moving. Form the letter in front of the class, start point and direction obvious. In Vinter & Chartrel's (2010) study of 48 children aged five to six learning cursive letters, watching the letter being written and then copying it gave the best results overall. Children who only copied a still letter made clearly worse letter shapes than those who watched it move.
- Then cover it and have them write it. Berninger et al. (1997) gave 144 first graders at risk for handwriting problems (Year 1 age in Australia) one of six treatments: five ways of teaching handwriting, plus phonological awareness training as a comparison. Numbered arrows showing stroke order and direction, combined with writing the letter from memory after studying it, worked best, for handwriting and for how fluently they wrote compositions.
- Trace briefly, then fade. A start dot or a traced first go is fine for a child who needs it. Get them to a blank line quickly.
- Children say the letter name, not the steps. Graham's summary of the research found that reciting formation steps aloud doesn't help, probably because it uses up working memory. Your own cue at the board, like "down and across" for t, is modelling, which is different.
- A few good ones, not a row of twenty. Graham warns against massed practice, the same letter over and over in one sitting. Write it a few times, circle the best two, and come back to it in later lessons.
- Keep it short and often. Tasmania's departmental handwriting guidelines set 10 to 15 minutes a day from Prep to Year 2, little and often. Graham suggests teaching it several times a week or daily, 50 to 100 minutes a week in all.
Graham's own first-grade programme grouped letters by how they're formed and kept confusable pairs like b and d, or u and n, in different units. If reversals still turn up, that's normal at this age. Treiman et al. (2014) tested 130 five- and six-year-olds and found that how often a child reversed letters didn't predict their later reading.
Handwriting comes first in the curriculum. The Australian Curriculum asks for handwriting in every year from Foundation to Year 2, as unjoined letters in Years 1 and 2. In Foundation, AC9EFLY08 asks children to form most lower-case and upper-case letters, and its elaboration calls for clear demonstrations of where to start and which way to go. NSW's syllabus adds digital technology, including word processing, from Year 1, next to handwriting, not instead of it.
Your state's letters are fine
Australia's eight states and territories share about five main handwriting styles, which can worry families who move interstate.
They do differ a little, in exit flicks and slant and the odd letter like k. The core movements agree: start at the top and go down, c-family letters go anticlockwise from about two o'clock, d is the curve and then the stem, and dots and crossbars come last. We found no study showing one model's letter shapes teach letters better than another's, and in a small UK study (24 children aged 5 to 7), Walker and Reynolds (2003) found children read a serif and a sans serif typeface equally well, with or without single-storey a and g. Teach your state's model well. What the studies measured was the act of forming the letter, and none of them compared models.
A paragraph for the newsletter
If you're passing this on to families, here's a version you can paste:
Your child is learning to write letters by hand this year. Studies with young children found that writing a letter by hand helped them recognise it better than typing it, and that writing it themselves beat tracing over it. At home, let them watch you write the letter, then have them write it themselves without copying. A few careful letters beat a whole page. Back-to-front letters are normal at this age.
Matching the letters on the page to the board
Whichever model your state uses, the letters on your slides and worksheets should match the ones you form at the board, or the demonstration and the page are teaching two shapes. Phonicspal sets every slide, worksheet and story in your school's handwriting font, with the right guideline style, so the model your class watches is the one they see everywhere. See how it works.
Study details are from the published papers linked above. Curriculum wording is from ACARA's Australian Curriculum v9 English.