Handwriting – Teaching Cursive and Manuscript Writing

New American Cursive

Handwriting for kids and adults. Free cursive handwriting and manuscript worksheets and fonts useful for homeschool children’s practice or teaching the D’Nealian alphabet and other handwriting styles. Great resources for improving cursive writing and learning to print neatly for both adults and children in the page below.

About Teaching Handwriting
Fonts – Styles of writing
History of Handwriting
Left-handers
Problems & Solutions
Worksheets to Improve Handwriting

About Teaching Handwriting

How to Teach Handwriting
Oversee practice so children don’t fill a page with improper work simply to finish quickly. Praise letters and words written well and have the student erase and rewrite anything unacceptable. While this may seem time consuming, remember that it will actually take more time to undo bad habits. There are four components to handwriting, whether a child is learning to print the letters or write in cursive “joined up:”

  1. correct letter formation
  2. uniform letter size
  3. uniform slant
  4. spacing

Fonts – Styles of Writing

Dyslexie
A free font to help those who tend to reverse letters of just have a hard time telling letters apart for whatever reason. Though not designed for handwriting, you could print out worksheets in this font to help out a dyslexic child.

Educational Fontware, Inc.
EFI makes and sells D’Nealian ®-style, Zaner-Bloser ©-style, Handwriting Without Tears (TM)-style, Harcourt Brace ®-style, Peterson Directed Handwriting ©-style, McDougal, Littell ©-style, Getty-Dubay Italic (TM), SSD, and Palmer style handwriting fonts. Commercial site.

Jardotty
Windows true type font (.ttf) to download directly from this link. Jardotty is a dotted alphabet good for creating your own traceable handwriting worksheets. Created by Christopher Jarman.

Jarmon
Windows true type font (.ttf) to download directly from this website. Christopher Jarman cursive handwriting font. The solid line version of Jardotty.

Learning Cursive Handwriting
Commercial site: Fontmenu.com Cursive Handwriting typeface offers the possibility to create exercises that follow the guidelines of the D’Nealian ® approach to cursive handwriting.

Learning Curve BV / Learning Curve BV Dashed
Learning Curve BV contains two versions, one is plain and the other dashed. This font also contains a set of dingbats that helps with practicing elements of cursive writing.

Print Clearly
Solid and dashed. From Blue Vinyl Fonts, which has lots of nice, free fonts for writing and other uses as well.

School Fonts
Mac & Win. Commercial. Block Letters and Cursive Handwriting typefaces enable any computer user to create exercises that follow the guidelines of the D’Nealian ® or the Zaner-Bloser ® approach and letter forming teaching techniques.

History of Handwriting

Ancient Scripts
Designed to give an introduction to writing systems, which hopefully will tantalize the reader into searching for more information on the web or in books and publications.

Left-handers

Tip: When creating worksheets for lefties, put the samples across the top, not down the left side.

Anything Left-Handed – Are you left handed?
We are a group of left-handed people providing products and information to make life a bit easier for left-handers around the world and campaigning to promote awareness, acceptance and empathy for left-handers. The accident rate for left handed people is much higher than for right handed people. Also, did you know left slanted

DKL Cursive and DKR Cursive
These fonts are patterned after the handwriting methods in the workbooks “Cursive Writing Skills,” by Diana Hanbury King. Ms. King has produced both a Right-handed Edition and a Left-handed Edition.

Left-handed But Not Left Behind
Author Annie Thomassen was a homeschool Mom for 9 years. During her daughter’s education she was also completing her undergrad degree, and researching left-handedness. She realized that there was very little out there on teaching a lefty, so she developed a writing method to teach her daughter. This ebook is the result.

Problems & Solutions

Accommodations and Modifications for Students with Handwriting Problems and/or Dysgraphia
Many students struggle to produce neat, expressive written work, whether or not they have accompanying physical or cognitive difficulties. They may learn much less from an assignment because they must focus on writing mechanics instead of content.

Dysgraphia
Often, dysgraphia is misunderstood. Parents and teachers may think you are lazy or that you don’t care about neatness. This means you have to try even harder to show that you do care.

Handwriting Club
Using Sensory Integration Strategies to Improve Handwriting. Students with difficulties in sensory processing, sensory awareness, and/or perceptual skills usually have handwriting problems.

Pocket Full of Therapy
Sells writing paper and graph paper with raised lines so that sensory learners can “feel” their way along as the write.

Worksheets to Improve Handwriting

Addressing Envelopes Practice
Print out these envelopes and stamps to use to practice addressing and stamping envelopes correctly.

The Amazing – Incredible Handwriting Worksheet Maker
Allows you to formulate a worksheet with your child’s name or a short sentence in any of 5 fonts, manuscript or italic.

Build a Handwriting Activity
Create your own worksheet with this form from EdHelper. Supports printing, cursive and D’Nealian.

Callirobics
Commercial site. Handwriting exercises to music to improve small-muscle skills and eye-hand coordination. Good for aural learners young and old.

D’Nealian alphabet worksheets
Learn and practice manuscript handwriting featuring fun coloring page images. These are suitable for preschool, kindergarten and early elementary.

Donna Young’s Handwriting Paper
A series of graded lined paper .pdf files with a wide variety of uses for free writing practice. Some have space at the top for a picture.

Jan Brett’s Alphabet Line Bulletin Board Set
Jan has such a charming set of alphabet posters, you’ll want them to decorate your room. They are in traditional, cursive and modern manuscript.

Free Practice Paper
As adults, sometimes we forget that kids need lots of practice to learn how to write clearly! It’s helpful to have lined paper to learn proper letter height and more.

Handwriting For Kids
Each lesson is featured on its own page, and kids are shown in simple steps how to write the numbers, letters, and sentences. Kids can trace uppercase and lowercase letters, and even blank sheets are provided for kids to practice more before their next lessons.

Handwriting Practice Sheets
These sheets may be printed and reproduced by parents, guardians, and teachers for home or classroom use. Donna Young’s collection.

Handwriting Worksheets
Some pretty basic worksheets for beginning printers. One in Zaner Bloser font.

Manuscript Hand Writing
Letter introduction goes along with the book, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. On Donna Young’s site.

Peterson Handwriting Lessons for Homeschools
Our workbooks and materials provide the tools needed to establish evidence based process for regular evaluation of specific qualities that relate to process skills.

Author: Ann Zeise

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *