Learning the alphabet

Because Alona is the only left-handed person it our family, she gets confused easily. When I hand her a spoon, fork, pencil, etc. it is always with my right hand. She naturally takes it in her right hand. And then tries to use her right hand with the tool. I have to remind her to use her left hand quite often- especially when eating. I cans see she is struggling and it is strange to me that she doesn't just switch hands. My mother and my sister are left-handed so it is not unusual to me. I can feel for left-handed people who have to use right-handed scissors. I had to use my mom's left handed scissors once and it hurt!
Alona has difficulty when it comes to writing. She often writes backwards. Because the whole world probably seems backwards to her, she has an especially hard time remembering which way letters and numbers should face. Mind you, she is only in first grade so I am not too concerned, but I do want to make it as easy for her as possible. So tonight we were doing her spelling homework and it had the words dark and bark. She could not remember which way the d and b went. So I came up with a great way for her to remember:
in "bad" the b and d beat up the a! I drew bad with an arrow pointing to the a under both the b and the d. She totally got it! She is so excited to have a good way to remember how b and d face- and I would imagine this is a difficult one for all children, not just the left-handed ones. Now if I can just come up with a way to help her remember which way 6 and 9 go. Hmmmmm.