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.

The post Handwriting – Teaching Cursive and Manuscript Writing appeared first on A2Z Homeschool – THE A-to-Z of Homeschooling.

And the corollary: What you know nothing about, your children will demand to learn!

On our old Yahoo Group, Rebecca asked:

But if you don’t have any college behind you, wouldn’t you feel as though the teacher who has had 4 years of college to become a certified school teacher, could likely teach the children some things that you could not?

Well, I have a BA in Philosophy and something like 100 units past that, but from too many colleges, so I don’t have a masters.

Our support group had a mom in it who was literally a rocket scientist. Did her children care to learn physics? Nope. They wanted to learn biology! They were real keen on nature! They wanted to identify trees by their leaves!

My husband had taken German, and I had taken French. Our son decided with a friend to learn Latin! Even more so when I protested I didn’t KNOW Latin, and besides, Spanish was so much more practical in California.

David Albert on this list has a story about learning how to play the violin just so he could talk to his daughters about music. David’s a smart fellow, but he’d never taken up a musical instrument in his life before homeschooling!

Teachers get a BA first in some subject matter, and then go a 5th year or longer to get a masters in education. Been there. Done that. I learned how to manage a class of about 30 kids, how to create tests, how to use various machines, how to help a non-English speaking kid learn English, the history of education. Stuff a classroom teacher needs to know to survive. There is NO correlation between what is learned at a school of education and what you need to know to teach your own children! (Well, it does help to know how to work a computer, but you have all picked THAT up!)

Want to do something interesting? Google “School of Education” and take a look at what is being offered at various education programs. Is there ONE class that would be of use to you trying to help your own children?

Here’s Harvard’s education program –

The Masters Degree will teach the following:
The Ed.M. is designed to be a yearlong intensive program for students who wish to study a particular field in education, acquire a general theoretical background for understanding past and future field experiences, or develop skills for use in professional work in education. Our program offerings include:

Arts in Education
Education Policy and Management
Higher Education
Human Development and Psychology
International Education Policy
Language and Literacy
Learning and Teaching
Mind, Brain, and Education
Prevention Science and Practice/CAS in Counseling
School Leadership
Special Studies
Teacher Education Program
Technology, Innovation, and Education

Here’s a state college’s program – San Jose State University near me in California. Your more “basic” education college’s Masters Degree:

Critical Issues in Education
Advanced K-8 Curriculum and Instruction
Sociology of Education
Learning in a Hi-Tech Environment
Seminar in Curriculum
Qualitative Research
Critical Perspective on Schooling in a Pluralistic Society
Critical Studies in Language, Culture, and Narrative
Classroom Issues in Language/Literacy Development of L2 Learners
Philosophy of Education
MA Project

Now I’m not knocking the titles, but the CONTENT of those courses will be on how to do these things with a whole SLEW of children in one small room. Yes, it is a “good idea” to incorporate “Arts in Education,” but do you really need to make your child learn every art available? If you have an “arty” child, then you just sign them up with the art museum course! Simple as that! If not available, you just supply the kid with different art materials and let them have at it! A book or two from the library may help with project ideas and technique as they get older. You don’t need to know the theories of art education in the schools to know to go buy your kid some crayons and paper!

The “Curriculum” classes are a semester long, maybe 3 hours a week. How much science or history do you think a new teacher learns in one of those? So how do “real” teachers manage to teach something they know nothing about? They read ahead, usually in the children’s text books, and those are often very wrong, just plain bad science and history! You, you get to read real books written by real scientists and historians, and then share your enthusiasm about the topic with your kids in any fashion that gives pleasure to both of you, taking hours or days to explore the subject together. I’ve heard of families who have participated for years with historic reenactment groups or making huge contributions to a specialized science or writing a novel, just because they’ve had the time and enthusiasm to do it.

Your first year will be your “Practicum,” so go easy on yourself. There is a learning curve, and it will take about a year for both you and your children to find a comfort level for living the learning lifestyle. It doesn’t happen over night.

You have so many advantages that teachers in public schools do not!

First off you really LOVE your children! Nothing forced or faked here!

They learn when they are ready, and you can go at a speed that makes sense, going over or dropping topics, repeating or moving on. They learn in a sunny room, or even outside! They are not hungry, but are well fed according to your family’s dietary beliefs. They can go to the bathroom when they need to. They get all the sleep they need, so are rested. If they need to move about, they can. They are healthier, as they aren’t exposed to so many viruses, and if they do get sick, they have time to recover. With all these proven and well researched learning pluses, you can’t miss! You just have to “be there” for your kids, and give of your time and finances to keep their learning projects happening!

I also liked Tammy’s reply to the post:

I’m going to surprise all of you and agree with Sarah, in several ways.

Tammy

She’s so right-on! Just about everyone in the whole world can teach my child something I cannot! Everyone has such unique experiences, that it is worth searching out others to find out just what they can teach your child about life.

Our Field Trips section is also a wealth of community resources for mentors for your children.

In our Table of Contents for this page, check out the pages under “I don’t know how to teach.” We’re here to help you understand how you can learn how to be the very best mentor for your child. The very best! And when you can’t be, how to find others to volunteer or to do it for a fee.

The post Murphy’s Laws of Homeschooling appeared first on A2Z Homeschool – THE A-to-Z of Homeschooling.