Letter writing instruction for children: Case-sensitive letter frequencies in children’s handwriting workbooks

Children’s ability to write letters automatically has been linked to academic achievement. Despite the importance of handwriting, handwriting instruction is often neglected and teachers use inconsistent practices to teach handwriting. Specifically, the frequency that children are presented opportunities to write individual block letters in handwriting workbooks has not been studied. Here, we provide the first case-sensitive letter frequency norms of handwriting workbooks for the English alphabet. We created these case-sensitive letter frequency norms by analyzing a corpus of 11 handwriting workbooks containing 31,164 letter requests. The results suggest that children’s handwriting workbooks may not be optimally designed to promote letter writing automaticity across the letters of the English alphabet. In particular, we found that not all letters are represented equally in workbooks ( p