"Handwriting Without Tears" without Money!

The 2012-2013 school year was our first year homeschooling.  I had a 5 1/2 year old and a just turned 4 year old and we were doing My Father's World Kindergarten curriculum.  I loved the Biblical integration along with the phonics and science instruction, and the gentle introduction of math concepts through daily activities.  There was only one thing I didn't love - the handwriting instruction, or, in my opinion, the lack thereof.  While it included practice pages for each letter, along with instructions for how to form each letter, these were grossly inadequate for my child, who rarely picked up a crayon to color, and who's writing and drawing ability included drawing a line and a circle.  He had never been to preschool.  He was such a busy child who learned plenty through playing.  He knew his letters and sounds before he was two years old.  But he was never interested in coloring or drawing, and I never pushed it.  I knew he'd learn to write in Kindergarten, and I was fine with waiting until then.

However, once we started Kindergarten, I knew he needed more instruction.  The curriculum, which began with practicing writing the letter S in the first week was NOT the recipe for his writing success. Immediately, I knew he needed an introduction to writing on three lines, and he needed to start by writing horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines on those three lines.  As a third grade teacher I had used Zaner-Bloser handwriting curriculum, so I went to their website and ordered samples of their Kindergarten and First Grade books.  Upon receiving them, I was happy to see that they began with learning to write horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines.  From there it progressed to the letters L, I, T, etc.  I could see right away that this was much more developmentally appropriate.  However, the directions for teaching were still boring.  It used the terms "horizontal, vertical, and diagonal" - new terms for my children who were also learning a new fine motor skill. I was looking for cute, kid-friendly descriptions...maybe even pictures of letter and numbers turned into characters to help children remember their formation.  I remembered learning that kind of thing as a child who was learning to write.  I searched the internet but didn't find what I was looking for....until I found Handwriting Without Tears. It had hands-on teaching materials that taught the components of writing, with child-friendly vocabulary (Big Line, Little Line, Big curve, little curve). For lower case letters, fun descriptions included phrases like "dive down," "magic c," "Slide down," and "Up like a helicopter."  It also gave instructions which would help eliminate reversals, which is something my four year old was doing.

     However, by the time I was convinced it was what I needed, we were done with Kindergarten, and my child had already learned to write, for the most part.  However, I like the HWT approach as it transitions into cursive writing, so I decided it was worthwhile to go back and teach HWT handwriting from here on out.  However, I didn't want to purchase all their materials, so I found some ways to do it myself at home, with homemade materials and free printable from the internet.  I want to use this blog to share what I have done.

Here is a downloadable sample of Handwriting Without Tears alphabet poster.  However, this sample can be printed on regular copy paper and laminated - a perfect size for homeschooling or one-on-one tutoring! 

Using materials I already had, (construction paper, magnet tape, a compass, a ruler, scissors and a laminator) I created magnetic pieces that would fit on our small magnetic white boards.  This mimics HWT's Wood Pieces for Capital letters, their magnetic pieces, and magnetic board.  These materials, along with their other hands-on products can be seen here. 

Homemade laminated letter pieces on our white board. 

             Magnet tape on the back of the letter pieces.           

In place of HWT's chalkboards, I also created small white boards for teaching and practicing capitals and lower case. I used a 3 1/2 x 5 photo frame for the capitals, and a 5x7 photo frame for the lower case. These handwriting without tears products can be found here for capital letter board and here for lower case lettter board.

Then, I found free printables to help with the teaching terms here.  I put them, along with free printable practice pages I found online such as this one in plastic sleeves and bound them together with rings.

I have also found the videos on HWT's website and on you tube to be very helpful in explaining their teaching methods.  We enjoyed doing the Mat Man activity with my homemade pieces. (See this video). This also helped my oldest who couldn't seem to get beyond drawing people with arms and legs coming out of their heads!  

Mat Man pieces store in a plastic sleeve

Our "Mat Man" 

I plan to purchase the workbooks and teacher's books on grade level, but for now I can get started with these items!  (Update:  I still haven't purchased the books, but am using these homemade materials with success!). 

Our First Day of Homeschooling

While I am sure I won’t be motivated to blog every school day, I thought it would be good and fun to blog our very first day. Our curriculum is My Father’s World, Kindergarten, and both children are participating, though this would actually be Asher’s kindergarten year, and Ellie’s PreK year.  But they both are ready to do the work at this level.

Our school-time discipline system is this traffic light.  It was inspired by a former co-worker of mine who used this in her classroom.  When I was thinking about what I could use for our homeschool discipline, this was the perfect answer because Asher LOVES traffic lights!  He was very motivated and wanted his car to stay on green.  I don’t think he even cared about the consequences that go with yellow or red, he just didn’t want his car to be on them! 

We started the day getting dressed and making beds before breakfast. Ellie wanted to get Schatzie ready for school too, so she combed her legs and

beard.  

  

Here’s a few pictures of our first day of school breakfast – nothing fancy – just cereal!

The first thing they did was to listen to me read day one of the creation story from the Bible.  Then they answered some questions about it.  They did very well sitting, listening, and remembering the story!

Then, they practiced writing their names.

Next, they cut out the number one which illustrated day one of creation, taped paper together to make a poster, and glued the number one onto the poster.  They’ll add numbers 2-7 in the following days for each day of creation.

After that we took a little break outside to ride bikes.  Then we came back in to review the alphabet (Asher’s knows this, of course, but it’s good for Ellie, and the point right now is to have easy work to establish the routines).

Then they worked on the first page of our creation book, shown here:

The last activity was to sing “My Father’s World.”  I found a you tube video with the Praise Baby version of this song, which they are familiar with since they used to listen to it to go to sleep!  It also had pictures and words.  Incidentally, there are a lot of great children’s songs like that on you tube.  They enjoyed watching some of them after “My Father’s World.”

Overall, we had a great day!  The skills we practiced were listening, comprehension, self-control, cutting, writing, gluing (fine motor), letter recognition, and ordinal numbers. Can’t wait to do it again tomorrow!