Monday, May 18, 2009

Handwriting

You probably know that we use Handwriting Without Tears. I have been a BIG fan for years! Well, to be honest, it has not worked out for us...

That is, until now!

Josh has issues with anything sticky, dirty, wet...well you get the picture! The whole Wet, Dry, Try lesson was a big mistake to use with him. And he immediately was frustrated and disliked the whole thing. And, unfortunately, I was too persistent since I knew it was such a good program. Well, eventually, I backed off and put everything but the wooden pieces away. These I left on our writing shelf, but still, he ignored them.
Finally, this week, it occured to me to start over but instead of using the Wet, Dry, Try, I grabbed the sand tray (which he loves???) and used that instead. So our Handwriting time looked like this...
  • Build letter with wooden pieces (talking about lines and curves as we go).


  • I write the letter in the sand tray then he writes the letter in the sand tray.


  • Finally he writes the letter on the wipe board. (could use paper but he likes the Yoda Wipe board!)

This worked really well and we did a-f! (Hmmm, but Shannon those are lowercase letters and HWT does not have lowercase???) Check here ~ Lowercase wooden pieces and letter cards! This guy makes these in a warehouse here in town! He also has a teacher store with some cool finds!

So anyway, I am thrilled and he was happy to be so successful writing the letters correctly.



*******Here is a picture of the lowercase wooden pieces...being used to make a treehouse...well, you know....

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for the link Shannon. I have been interested in the idea of HWT but being a Montessori mama couldn't see the point of confusing things with the upper case letters. These are a great option :)

Shannon said...

No problem Amber! I was THRILLED when I found the lowercase pieces!