4 Easy Steps to Curriculum Success
Getting the Most from Your Handwriting Teacher’s Guide
By Susan Little, OTR/L
Why should you spend time reading your handwriting teacher’s guide? Because it helps you avoid and overcome many classroom challenges—including time spent on remediation. Your students can’t learn handwriting on their own from workbooks or handouts. They need active teaching. You can make it easy for them to learn and do well in all their classes. Your Handwriting Without Tears® teacher’s guide shows you how. Regardless of your teaching experience, you’ll benefit from the flexible lesson plans, time saving tips, and teaching guidelines and strategies:
1. Start in a Snap
The teacher’s guide is the companion to the student workbook and includes step-by-step instructions on how to teach each letter or number lesson in just minutes a day.
If you spend some time in the beginning familiarizing yourself with your teacher’s guide, you’ll have the core knowledge you need to teach the program. Check out these key sections and see how they can help you address all your daily challenges:
Getting Started: This section helps you set up your classroom and prepare your students for learning. You’ll discover important elements of the handwriting process, how to prevent bad habits, how to integrate handwriting instruction with your reading program, and the stages of learning. You’ll also find a convenient review of everything students need to know by the time they reach your class.
Lessons: Here you will find all your letter and lesson teaching pages, warm-up exercises, supporting multisensory activities, and lesson reviews. Letter lessons are divided into groups based on stroke formation: center starters, starting corner letters, and so forth. 
Advice: This section helps you identify and remediate common handwriting problems. It includes proven tips and strategies developed by educators and occupational therapists that will eliminate hours of guesswork and frustration.
Extras: Use this section as a supplement to your daily instruction. Get answers to frequently asked questions; plan lessons with teaching guidelines; and get remediation techniques, letter formation charts, and ideas for extra practice and self-correction.
The HWT curriculum is extremely flexible so you can tailor it to your existing curriculum and schedule. However, if you want a completely structured approach, your teacher’s guide includes day-by-day and week-by-week lesson plans.
These two pages of your guide show you how to progress through the lessons and include page numbers to teaching activities.
2. Organize and Integrate with Ease
The guide can help you organize your day and incorporate handwriting with your language arts and reading programs. You’ll see how to integrate handwriting with reading, math, spelling, grammar, and even science and history.
The guide also incorporates other school subjects in the lesson pages. With very little effort on your part, your students will learn about adding, making plurals, forming compound words, writing poems, and other language arts skills.
3. Teach in Ten
You can teach the lessons in your teacher’s guide in just 10 minutes a day, with an additional five minutes for student practice. In fact, keeping the lessons brief alleviates boredom and gives students something to look forward to. You can be as flexible as you want to make the handwriting program fit into your daily schedule. You can organize your own lesson plans or follow the Teaching Guidelines in the Extras section of your guide.
Just go to your selected lesson of the day, demonstrate the steps, and give students a few minutes to do the given exercise. The more you model for them, the sooner they will learn to write quickly and independently.
4. Motivate with Multisensory Fun
The Handwriting Without Tears multisensory teaching approach is what motivates students to learn and thrive. Each lesson incorporates elements of music, movement, vocal variety, and playful exercises including the following:
- Imaginary Writing
- Wet-Dry-Try
- Word Games
- Voices
- Letter Size and Placement
Time goes by quickly when you can make lessons playful and interesting. Moreover, students are more likely to enjoy and remember what they have learned.
We know you have so much to do in your class each day. However, take a few minutes now to review your guide. The payoff and time saved will be worth it. You’ll find that solid knowledge of the curriculum will help you teach more effectively. You will also enjoy watching your students master a fundamental life skill. Ultimately, success and fluency in writing equals success in all academics.
Comments (2)
— Karin Taylor on September 4, 2008
— Karen Krepps on October 3, 2011
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