Dear Friends,

The back to school season is a favorite time here at Handwriting Without Tears. We want this to be the start of a very good year, so we packed this newsletter with activities and ideas for you.

Now is the perfect time to quickly assess your children’s handwriting skills. Use our new Screener of Handwriting Proficiency. It’s free and very easy to use. It will give you both individual and class reports, telling you where your children are and what they need.  We’re proud that the screener was a finalist for the 2010 Association of Educational Publishers’ Distinguished Achievement Award.

Before you use worksheets this year, become a smarter worksheet consumer. Learn how to tell good worksheets from bad ones and how to choose and design good ones. Download our new A+ Worksheet Maker. This free tool helps you make your own worksheets for such subjects as spelling, vocabulary, and expository writing, using the HWT font and double lines.

At our core, we are about active, joyful learning without tears.  If you work with preschoolers, consider Tag Bags, a new math readiness product. It’s a new part of our Get Set for School Pre-K program. Tag Bags build fine motor and early math skills such as counting, matching, sorting, pattern, and number recognition. When we field tested this new product, the children simply loved them. They didn’t want to stop playing and learning with them. Although they’re designed to promote math and fine motor skills, we’re already seeing other uses for this appealing product.

Wishing you a good start to a good year,

In this Issue