Learning Writing through Chinese Calligraphy

Beginning February of this year, I finally signed the kids up to a Chinese calligraphy class.

Best extra-curriculer class we took this semester, other than music.

I’d wanted the kids to do Chinese calligraphy for a long time.   Three years ago, I visited a Montessori preschool and was told that they don’t ask the children to write, but instead teach characters through calligraphy and learning the evolution of characters.   We know that many kids nowadays write too early.  You can see it in their pencil grip.  And especially with Chinese, where they traditionally do repetitive writing, it’s not good for their hands.

Calligraphy is a good alternative if the children aren’t ready to hold a small pencil.

Just like Montessori teaches cursive first, Chinese calligraphy is like cursive.  It is much closer to drawing and is great for young children because they can now write with their whole arm and write big characters.

I knew all this, I tried to get the kids to do some calligraphy our first year.  But Thumper didn’t like me constantly correcting the way she holds her brush and the way she writes her strokes.  (I know I know!)   Our 30 year old ink smelled horribly.  I was super afraid ink would get on the carpet and constantly admonished the children to be careful.

Basically I set it up so that the kids wouldn’t want to repeat the exercise.

Finally this year I got tired of trying to tell Thumper that 一撇 means you have to lift the pencil up at the end of the stroke.   But without that knowledge her writing looked funny.  There was no way she was going to get it without some formal calligraphy lessons.

Our calligraphy teacher actually has a degree in Chinese art and studied calligraphy in college.  The first day she talked my head off on the different styles of calligraphy, none of which I was very familiar with, though I’d heard of their names in my research of Chinese writing.

All I really wanted was just for Thumper to learn the way to write different strokes well, understand the placement of the components relative to each other when she writes.  So whatever she said went over my head.

Our class was 2 hours long each week, with the first half Chinese painting (國畫) and the second half calligraphy (書法) .  To be able to write calligraphy, and really writing in general, the children need to be able to move their wrists easily.  So the teacher has them paint as a way to “warm up” their wrist.

I have to admit, I wasn’t too digging the class the first month or two.  Every week the teacher would tell me about a new writing style (魏碑，顏體，歐體， etc) they were studying that week, what constituted that style, and how some styles were better suited for young children than others.  Or, she would talk about how Chinese painting is done with calligraphy strokes, so it’s a great way to indirectly learn calligraphy.

There’s a different theme every week for the painting, used to practice different types of strokes.

This went all over my head and I didn’t see how it aligned with my goal of just having the kids learn to write their basic strokes well, understand the relationship between character components, etc.

As it turns out, I just didn’t have faith in the teacher.  But I’m running ahead of myself here.

In the meantime, we had homework.  In the beginning, we had about 10 minutes of daily calligraphy practice, which often ended up being 2-3 times a week only.  The children had to practice their strokes and write their character of the week on these special Aquadoodle-like mats; basically writing with water and the “ink” dries in a few minutes.

I loved it.  Finally we had a consistent way for Astroboy to learn how to write Chinese characters, using a medium that suited his hand muscle development.  He learned how to write his name in Chinese instead of zhuyin.  We even used the mat to learn our English cursives!

Rather than writing a character 6-10 times, we only do it 1-2 times.  Even then it’s a stretch for Astroboy, sometimes grudgingly done in the name of homework.  But I find it is not the number of times he writes each session, it’s the consistency in daily practicing and then using it in daily life.

In April, we took a month off because we were moving.  By then the teacher was telling me how Astroboy’s wrist has “opened”, as in he’s able to control his wrist better when he writes.  Throughout our move, whenever we had time for school work, we still tried to keep up our practice.  It’s fairly easy to do when all you need is some water and special mat.

Returning for a last month of class, the teacher switched the kids over to using real paper.  The children also learned about the different types of paper and calligraphy brush.  All the time writing at home on special mats, I had felt that Thumper’s writing hadn’t improved much.  But on paper, I started seeing the difference.

She talked about why we write characters in a specific stroke order, it all has to do with how the hand flows as it writes.  All of this is much easier to see when we do calligraphy.

Can you tell which two was written by the teacher?

Another reason I loved calligraphy is that it is about practicing mindfulness.  The more concentration you have, the better you’re able to be at one with your brush as you write.  In fact, at a high level, calligraphy writing is connected to your breath.   I would show up to a super quiet and concentrating children writing these beautiful calligraphy, especially Thumper.  Not sure what changed but switching to paper was definitely one reason.

Though we only had 3 months of calligraphy, it’s been a fruitful endeavor.  One thing I learned last year is that we don’t have to take classes or study a specific skill forever.  For example, we can work on handwriting for half a year and then move onto something else.  Similarly, with Chinese calligraphy, I think the kids have enough of a base for us to continue our practice at home.

Going forward, I plan to have Astroboy learn how to write Chinese and English cursive by using the water calligraphy brush.  For Thumper, it will be more of a mindfulness practice.

If we were to sign up for class again, I would probably request that the children learn how to write calligraphy with a pen.  That’s also an art in itself.

I guess the short-hand summary is, if your child isn’t holding a pen properly and you want them to learn how to write, Chinese calligraphy is a super good way to go.  You learn mindfulness, how strokes order come about, you get to draw in big letters, and there’s less demand on super fine motor skills, and most importantly, you start, from the beginning, on seeing what a beautiful Chinese character looks like, rather than those blocky print characters kids end up imitating as they learn to write.

If You Want to do Calligraphy at Home

All of our supplies were provided by the teacher.  But apparently you can get something similar from Amazon.

1.  Magic Cloth Water For Learning Strokes

Every practice session starts with going over all the stroke orders

2.  Magic Cloth with Grids

Followed up by practicing the character of the week on this type Magic cloth.

3. Magic Cloth with Chinese Characters

We didn’t use this one much other than at the beginning when they were learning all the different strokes.

4.  Ink

I got my ink at Daiso for $1.50

5.  Calligraphy Brush

She told me that in a good brush, the hairs will be mostly form a horizontal line when you press on the brush hair together.  And when you wet it, they will also taper very nicely into a point and hold that shape.

She was very insistent that we transport our brush in a bamboo mat Bamboo Brush Mat when not in use.

And after every session, we had to hang up our brush to dry.  

6.  Calligraphy Paper

These Rice Paper from Amazon look like the ones they used in class.

The children also got to try very expensive paper provided by the teacher to see the difference.  It was very neat!