Yesterday I attended a Handwriting without Tears workshop and it was awesome. To start off, upon arrival, I was given this canvas bag stuffed with materials that are mine to keep ( a teacher's dream! Free stuff is always appreciated!) The bag contained teachers manuals and practice workbooks for grade levels K-4, both a small slate and larger blackboard with lines, wooden pieces for building letters, and a terrific cd with kid friendly songs to help students remember concepts such as starting capital letters at the top and using spaces in between words in a sentence. Below are some photos of my goodies!
Teacher manuals and workbooks
First Grade manual and workbooks
Wooden pieces for building letters
Small slate board helpful for preventing reversals
CD with great songs about letters and writing
The presenter was an Occupational Therapist and provided a lot of good information about the development of handwriting and students' needs. The most surprising thing she mentioned was that little kids need little pencils. I have always seen fatter pencils and crayons used for little kids and she said those are actually more difficult to use and require more strength, not less. She said golf size pencils are actually ideal. I had NO idea! She also showed paper with 2 lines, rather than the typical paper with two solid lines and a dotted line down the middle. She said kids are more successful with two lines and I am excited to try that.
The Handwriting without Tears program makes learning how to write letters fun, and provides an organized meaningful sequence that groups similar letters together. There are diver letters, frog jump letters, magic c letters and more. She explained how teaching similar letters together helps kids remember how to correctly write them. Simply showing letters in alphabetical order does not work as well.
Although I wish that my school would adopt this program, I do not think we have enough time in our daily schedules to make room. I know that I want to, and I plan to, but I will have to tackle that myself. It would be great if students would begin this program at an early age when pre-writing skills are emerging, but I still think that it is a useful tool for me to use in helping some of my students who could benefit from further instruction on handwriting. I am excited to try it out of a few of my students, particularly for reversals such as b and d as well as the numbers 5 and 6.
2 comments:
I use a b is a bat and a ball and a d is a doughnut with the boys and it helps them remember that and the sound those letters make.
The stick of the lowercase b is a bat and then the round part is the ball...
A doughnut is the circle of the d that comes first.
I love HWT's and I'm so glad you went and are excited about their program. Maybe you could be the one that brings it to your school?
As a dyslexic/dysgraphic adult who self-remediated and became a handwriting instruction specialist -- http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com -- I have to say that I get a lot of my business from people who saw their kids'/students' handwriting really worsening during/immediately after the so-called "Handwriting without Tears" program. (I call it "so-called" because I see its name as false advertising, given the fair number of people for whom I've see that program cause a lot of tears, a lot of failure and frustration, a lot of non-progress or actual regression of skills.
The company also has a poor record of acknowledging customers who call them for help with the above -- those parents, teachers, OTs, and sometimes even *kids* who call the company to report frustration, serious difficulties with the program, etc., hear back such "advice" as: "You are the ONLY person who has EVER complained ... if you are having a problem, then you are just not TRYING hard enough, because our program is PERFECT!" (verbatim quote from a call I witnessed).
For me, an even bigger ethical concern about the program involves the "fine print" in its standard contract with schools and districts. The "HWTears" corporation's standard contract gives schools/districts a 70% discount on the list price -- but ONLY as long as absolutely everybody in the school or district uses that program & uses ONLY that program! The minute that the school or district breaks the exclusivity (for example, when a number of the kids turn out to do poorly with HWTears so the school/district finds them something else and stops ordering HWTears items for the kids that the program didn't work for), the discount vanishes and the costs to the participating school or district immediately skyrocket (on a contract that the school/district can't get out of). This gives teachers/administrators a gigantic incentive NOT to notice, NOT to act, when one or more students have problems with "HWTears" -- because changing things for even one student (to help him or her succeed) would break the contract and impose a penalty (suddenly higher prices) that would prevent the school from affording what they'd "bought into" and can no longer get out of. (I have actually found administrators and even HWTears staffers/reps making threat-calls to teachers and sometimes to parents of kids who didn't do well within "HWTears": basically telling the parents/teachers: "You'd better NOT find a problem with the program for anyone, or you are not being true to the program and you are hurting the school's budget by noticing a program." In at least some schools, this has given "HWTears-using" teachers a strong incentive to say that certain kids "are great handwriters" when they actually cannot handwrite worth a bean -- I have seen administrators instruct teachers to evaluate a kid as "succeeding with the program" because the kid could sing all the program's teaching-songs, could perform the HWTears program's dances and puppet-shows and other teaching-activities ... so never mind that s/he couldn't actually write!
Kate Gladstone
founder/CEO of Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
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