How coloring and painting improve writing skills
Kids love to draw, and they do this first before they start to write, so we tend to love their drawings, especially the first one. Coloring is the joy of early childhood, but it is also the earliest form of a child’s handwriting. These tools allow the child to express their creativity, whether they’re using sleek colored pencils, chalky wands, inky markers, or bright waxy sticks. Coloring is very important and plays a crucial role in childhood. Apart from being a creative outlet, it also has several other benefits, such as improving hand strength, the precision of grasp, visual perceptual skills, and increased attention span. It’s also crucial for early childhood skills, such as spatial reasoning, fine motor skills, and pre-writing development.
Many people know that coloring has crucial benefits for a child but don’t realize how it helps improve writing skills. Like every baby has to learn how to crawl before they start walking for the brain to develop properly, coloring is also not an isolated skill. If a child can master good coloring techniques, several benefits are woven into the intricacies, including improved handwriting. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the ways that coloring helps to improve a child’s handwriting.
- Hand-eye coordination
To color, the child’s hand and eye must work together. The connection between these two body parts is crucial for good handwriting. With the eye, they get to identify what they need to complete the task but use their hand to accomplish it. Coloring and painting help build this integral partnership because the eyes would have to assess the dimensions and boundaries the hand has to navigate. This process consistently helps to develop and fine-tune hand-eye coordination, which plays a crucial role in the child’s handwriting success.
When infants become aware of their hands, they start grabbing at objects. Sometimes, they may miss the mark or fail to grab them properly. However, their hand and their eye relationship improve with time and practice. In the first few months of their lives, they build consistency in reaching out, grabbing objects they see, and becoming more successful with time.
When they start to color as toddlers, there’s a rapid increase in their hand-eye coordination through consistent, repetitive movements. They also develop spatial awareness within the boundaries of their coloring canvas. This is another layer of development in the brain added to the established ones.
The development of these skills is not limited to children alone. These benefits are also available for adults if they take conscious efforts in coloring to stay within the set boundary and focus on details. As a result, their handwriting will improve.
- Fine motor skills
The hand-eye coordination emphasizes the connection between the hand’s movement and what the eyes see. However, fine motor skills have to do with the movement of the muscles to get things done. It’s also an essential skill that must be developed for good handwriting.
When toddlers start to grab objects, the type of movement they often use excludes the thumb. As they grow, they start incorporating the thumb, developing the pincer grasp, before the more intricate finger movements.
Coloring helps to develop a child’s fine motor skills properly. As the child uses age-appropriate tools, they gain more fine motor movements, increasing their skill.
- Endurance and strength
Before anyone becomes a pro at a marathon race, they must have started with short sprints because of a lack of stamina. They increase their mileage from these short runs as their stamina improves. This is how it is for handwriting as well. Learning to use muscles differently than they’re accustomed to can cause fatigue and ache. So, it’s important to build endurance for long stretches. That’s how handwriting works as well. The muscles in the hand, wrist, and fingers don’t often have the strength to take notes, finish an assignment, or write a correspondence without aches and fatigue. This is why they must be strengthened.
Coloring is one of the most effective ways to build the strength and endurance of these muscles. Although initially, coloring a small picture may bring fatigue, the child’s endurance and strength improve over time, and they can do more at once. Because coloring with colored pencils or crayons requires some pressure, the strength of the hands and fingers will improve due to the mechanics of the pressure applied.
This may also work for adults that have become used to digital communication. Coloring can help to regain the finger and hand endurance and strength they may have lost because of deconditioning. While you may choose to seek essay writer if you don’t have the endurance to write an essay, you should also make a move to improve your endurance and strength. You must have noticed that people’s handwriting becomes worse as they age. While the decline can also result from underlying health conditions, muscle endurance and strength loss are crucial factors.
- Forethought and planning
This is another rarely discussed aspect of coloring. Some examples of how this works in coloring are:
- Which color should I use here?
- When should I continue or stop at an edge in response to a specific design?
- How should I outline the sections?
Painting and coloring involve a lot of planning and forethought. Although we may not focus on these things consciously, our brain is doing so on our behalf. The brain activity planning the coloring technique to use and what the complete art looks like also determines the quality and style of the handwriting. In this case, the forethought includes questions like:
- Below the line or above the line?
- Should I fit a new word at the end or go to the next line?
- How much space will I need for the letter to form without appearing crowded?
Our brain processes these things without us thinking about them actively or consciously. The frontal lobe starts and executes planning and problem-solving, and painting helps to strengthen these skills.
Conclusion
More than we know, coloring has a huge impact on our brains. It’s more than we can comprehend. Our brains also need exercise as much as our physical bodies do. With coloring, we can properly exercise our brains in several ways, including planning and forethought, and we also reap the benefit of this in our handwriting.
