Educators
Handwriting Without Tears® aims to make legible and fluent handwriting an easy and automatic skill that every student can master. Our unique and compelling curriculum design and teaching strategies facilitate this goal.
Here’s why the program works for all children…
- Easy to teach and easy to learn
- Requires minimal preparation and teaching time—just 15 minutes of handwriting instruction a day
- Reduces need for one-on-one time and remediation
- Instructional methods are fun, entertaining, and research-based
- Uses uniquely successful strategies to teach letter formation, placement, spacing, neatness, and cursive connections
The result: Handwriting Without Tears for children, parents, and educators! Best of all, it’s cost effective. The workbooks costs half as much as other major publishers’ programs. However, schools and parents tell us that the real savings come from the success of the program. There’s little need to spend extra time or money on handwriting instruction, evaluations, special services, and tutoring. The best costs less.
Getting Started with HWT
Use your teacher’s guide to become familiar with the program. It includes letter and lesson teaching strategies for each page of the workbook, and guidelines for what to teach each day and week. Lessons for effective teaching are clear and simple to follow.
Do the suggested step-by-step demonstrations, move at your students’ pace, and allow for review and mastery of skills to help them develop good handwriting habits. Consistency is important. Devote a small amount of time to handwriting each day and you will see positive results.
Time Management
Ideally, instruction time should be a total of 15 minutes a day. It is better to have students produce five minutes of quality handwriting than to insist on drills and monotonous writing. The workbooks are set up for children to copy only once from each perfect model on a page.
If your students are motivated and want to practice five days per school week, then go for it! Fifteen minutes per day will not produce burnout.
Use teachable moments. Take advantage of opportunities during the week to practice new letters, new words, or maybe even sentence writing. HWT has journal notebooks that are perfect for writing about interesting things encountered throughout the week. The key is to give your students appropriate instruction (live demonstrations), then allow time for review and mastery before expecting independent writing.