Today we're going to talk about printing. And you might think, I already know how to print. Except that if you're not making your letters a certain way, there's two things that can happen. One, people aren't able to read your beautiful writing as well as you think they can because your Gs are the size of your As or the size of your Ts. And that makes it really hard to read letters because some letters go up, some letters go down, and some letters they're in the middle. So that's important. And then the second is if you're not holding your pencil in a tripod grip it's really tiring for your hand. You're using way more energy than you need to to write your stories down. And the third reason is because if you are not forming them correctly from the top to the bottom, then later, if you want to learn cursive writing, you won't be able to because you'll end your letters at the top instead of the bottom and you won't be able to go right into the next letter because cursive writing is all about linking letters together. So that's why. First thing we're going to do is talk about tripod grip. They call it tripod because of the three finger grip, tri means three. So if you have a pencil pick it up now and look and see if all three of your fingers are touching the pencil and see if you have more than three fingers touching the pencil. Yeah? Okay, here's a way that you can have a tripod grip without thinking about it. So in front of you, put your pencil facing towards you. So the tip is towards you.

Then you're going to take your thumb and your forefinger like it's a pincer. Show me your pincer. Yep. And I want you to pince and flip. And then you will have a tripod grip. Can you see how we have one, two, three fingers? Okay, put it down. Pencil facing towards you, the lead part. Pinch, don't worry about your third finger, that'll just happen naturally. Pinch your thumb and your fourth finger and pick it up. Good job. If you're having trouble, lean your hand even more over like so that it becomes like a hook. And pick it up. Great. So whenever you get confused, that's how you can just reset your hand. When I learned to print, I put four fingers, so I held my pencil like this. And that meant that I just had, I had more stability, but it just took so much more energy than three fingers. So that's why tripod. Tri means three. One, two, three. So pick up your pencil again. And in the air, we're going to go over the three different types of letters. So.

When I say a line, I really mean a space and I'll show you what I mean. stay in the middle line, which I mean just the space, the middle and up or the middle and down. There's no letters that stay up here and there are no letters that stay down here. So there's only three types of letters. The first that stay in the middle. What's an example? So A, all right, A. See, it's on one line. And when I say it's on one line, I mean it's within these two lines, it's on one space. So what's an example of a letter that is on one line and goes up? So it's actually on two spaces. Can you think of one? Mm-hmm, okay, so F is one, H is one, L is one. I'll use D, because it looks like A, but it goes up. So D, see how it goes all the way up to the top line? So now let's think of a letter. that is on one line and goes down. So it takes up two lines like the D, but it goes in the other direction. Can you think of some? J, Y, yep. I can think of one that looks like these two letters. Can you think of that?

Yeah, G. So it looks like A and then it goes down and has a tail. So can you notice how these three letters all look like what letter? Exactly. So once you learn a couple of letters like A, you'll be able to easily make all the letters of the alphabet. So it's not going to be as hard as you think. You don't have to learn 26 letters of the alphabet. You need to learn just a few with some variations. A D is just an A that's gotten taller and a G is just an A with a tail. Okay.