Improving writing skills in the Early Years

When thinking about strategies for helping our youngest children to improve their writing skills and eventually become successful writers, you may be surprised to learn that this does not start with the use of a pencil! Before the age of 5 yrs (and often later) the bones in a child’s hands are still developing and are not fully formed. This means that producing letters on paper can be challenging, and often detrimental to their overall physical development. Before focusing on the smaller movements such as pencil grip and fine motor control, children need lots of opportunities to build on their gross motor skills – working on their chest, shoulder and arm muscles as well as developing motor muscle planning in order to appropriately sequence body movements for a controlled and desired outcome.

It's not just their larger muscle development which forms part of the pre-requisites needed for successful writing later on – the act of writing and mark making itself needs to be purposeful, engaging and most importantly…fun! I could spend hours writing about the benefits of play-based learning, tailored to children’s interests, but essentially this is the long and short of it: If you want a child to be engaged with their learning, the learning needs to appeal to them and must be fun. If something is ‘fun’, we enjoy doing it, and when we enjoy doing something, we process it, retain and remember it much more effectively…we become more successful, because we enjoy it.

So…

Why Collagen Becomes More Important After 40

 

At some point in your 40s, you start noticing things. Recovery from a hard workout stretches from one day to three. Your knees feel stiff on the stairs first thing in the morning. The skin around your eyes looks a little less firm than it did last year. These changes tend to sneak up on you, and most people chalk them up to "just getting older."

That explanation isn't wrong. But it's incomplete. A lot of what you're feeling traces back to a single structural protein: collagen. And once you understand what's happening to it after 40, the changes make a lot more sense.