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This book has been written to help young children learn the essential skills for good handwriting. Handwriting is a skill that requires a lot of practise and instruction. This book provides both instruction and practise activities for the student.
It also provides activities that may generate discussion. Towns and suburbs, names, punctuation, rhymes and stories are presented in lessons to help children practise capital letters, word spacing and be of general interest.
Letters are introduced according to movements. From the simple downstroke to the more complex anticlockwise and clockwise movements for letters requiring combinations of movements. Therefore, letters are not in alphabetical order. Both capital letters and lower case letters are treated in one lesson. Past experience should have given children some knowledge of letter shapes. A teacher who wants to introduce letters in an order that supports a reading program can do so with confidence. Fluency movements and combinations are introduced in some lessons to support the letter being introduced, while stories and general activities further support positioning of letters in words and stories.
Before each lesson the teacher should ensure each child is positioned to learn and develop good handwriting habits. These include:
Any of these are acceptable. There are examples for left-handers too.
This program introduces the strategies of trace, copy, complete and evaluate. Each lesson provides a letter to begin, followed by a training exercise, involving the letter being introduced. The child then traces over the letter along the writing line, then makes two lines of copy. A starting point for each letter attempt is provided for the child. Directional arrows indicate how the letter is to be formed. The sentences provided allow the child to use letters in context of writing. The trace activities help reinforce the feel of handwriting.
With each letter introduced the practise activities should give the child the basic feel of how the letter is to be formed as well as how the letter fits into words and stories. This skill should then be practised independently in other writing aspects of the curriculum.
There is a clockface character in some lessons to remind the child how to hold a pencil, sit correctly, move the book up as the page fills and keep the page at 7 degrees. If sometimes encourages the child to do well. This is more evident with the introduction of letter forms.
BODIES, HEADS AND TAILS Letters are structured as head and body letters, body only letters, as well as body and tail letters. This fun identification helps the child understand that letters need to be within or to the guidelines. Brief discussion of letters at the start of a lesson will keep the child mindful of letter heights and to create the letter between the lines.
Images shown accurately depict our books, some have been slightly altered for illustration purpose only.
