A major advantage of Worksheets4Teachers is its flexibility. As with any new skill, children will learn to handwrite at different speeds. As a teacher you can choose to follow the suggested order or you can take any exercise and teach it as an independent lesson. Students will perform early literacy exercises matching their level of competency and achievement, ranging from beginner to advanced. Activities include: tracing, tracking, copying and practicing patterns, fun games and activities such as cut and paste, matching words, associating letters with sounds, and searching words. Concepts include: the alphabet, numbers, capital letters, lower case and the following vocabulary words: color words, numbers words, days of the week, months of the year and animal names. Each exercise is available in Manuscript and D’Nealian-Print style, and both in English and in Spanish! As a teacher, you will derive great satisfaction from seeing your students’ progress and gain confidence while using HW4T. Handwriting Worksheets4teachers gives you more than 500 pages of relevant and fun activities on each style and language!
Why handwriting Still Matters?
Although computers are everywhere in these technological times, handwriting continues to be an important activity. Certain tasks, such as taking notes, filling out forms, or writing letters are best performed using handwriting. With the introduction of the typewriter in the late 19th century, the importance of handwriting began to diminish and, of course, the personal computer has accelerated that decline. It is therefore somewhat ironic that HW4T should use computers to teach and develop handwriting skills.
“Handwriting is for writing…. Handwriting is the vehicle carrying information on its way to a destination. If it is illegible, the journey will not be completed. Handwriting, like skin, shows the outside of a person. But beneath the skin beats the living organism, the life’s blood, the ideas, the information… for a person who has poor handwriting, the road ahead is difficult. In spite of the high quality of ideas and information, the writer will bear a life-long burden… when handwriting flows the writer has a better access to his own thoughts and information.
Donald Graves (1983)* *Dr. Donald Graves, Professor of Education at the University of New Hampshire, he is a highly respected authority on the writing process
Do you remember when you learned to write? Not long ago, a student`s good handwriting was a clear sign of good teacher. Fluent, legible handwriting, perfectly formed letters, of the correct size, slope and spacing was a reflection of a good education.
Nowadays many students struggle to produce neat, legible written work, whether or not they have accompanying physical or cognitive difficulties. This is due in part to the fact that teachers focus on writing to the exclusion of handwriting. There are so many higher order needs and curriculum standards to be achieved that teachers very often can’t afford the luxury of time for handwriting practice.
Young children have a great desire to write well, but they are often frustrated because of their lack of coordination and because they find that it is far from easy to produce fine handwriting. As a result, many children nowadays regard handwriting as unimportant and rather boring and they try to avoid it as much as they can. Handwriting has to be regarded as a major activity. If we are to help students to become good writers we must start to teach them handwriting when they are in early grades. It needs to be a continuous process, with specific, clearly defined objectives being targeted. We should praise them for their efforts, schedule regular practice work and let them see how important handwriting is by closely supervising them and monitoring their work. Through regular practice we improve all our skills and Handwriting Worksheets 4 Teachers achieves that end by providing activities which are stimulating and enjoyable. Not only that, it also makes life easier for hard working teachers!
