Efficacy of a prewriting intervention: A pilot randomised control trial

For writing to be easy to read, students need to form letters the right way and with good control. Before they can do this, they need to learn basic pencil strokes used to make letters. Handwriting programmes are used in schools and with children who find writing hard. We know some of these programmes help, but we do not know which prewriting programmes work best. We wanted to find out if a programme called Peggy Lego helps and if it is easy to use. We did six Peggy Lego sessions with 18 kindergarten children in Western Australia. All of the children got better at their prewriting skills, but we could not tell if Peggy Lego helped more than routine teaching, or if the children improved over time. We asked the students how they felt about the programme. Most said they liked it and thought their drawing got better, even though it was a bit hard. Future research could look at whether feeling more confident helps children when they start learning to write letters.