Just a few thoughts on handwriting...If you decide to use HWT, I highly recommend purchasing the wood pieces. They really help cement the HWT formation of letters for young children, especially for those children that are tactile or kinesthetic learners. If, however, you don't have the budget for the wood pieces, the pattern for the wood pieces is in the teacher's guide. So, you can use the pattern to make your own big line, little line, big curve and little curve out of whatever material you wish (foam sheets, sandpaper, etc.)
In my experience, ball and stick formation of letters
can lead to "disconnected letters". For example, lowercase a may look like a lowercase o and i instead of the letter a. In HWT style, they teach writng lowercase a as a "magic c" letter, that starts with c, travels stright up and back down to "bump the line".
With that said, handwriting style is a very personal choice. Regardless of the style you choose, the most important things to remember are that you
demonstrate how to hold the pencil correctly,
demonstrate how to write the letters for your dc,
use consistent langauage when teaching how to write the letter,
try to avoid using "dashed or dotted letters" for tracing (try a gray crayon or highlighter to make letters for your children to trace instead - dashed letters can be confusing), and
watch that your dc write the letters the same way every time as they are learning, or they may develop habits that are hard to break!
A little extra effort when you are teaching can save a lot of time down the road, especially where neatness and reversals are concerned. Teaching capitals before lowercase letters is also a good idea, since it is more developmentally appropriate and also allows time for children to learn good habits without having to worry about size or too many different strokes. (Capital letters all start at the top and are are all the same size; capital letters only require four basic strokes.)
Also keep in mind recent research on the use of italic/D'Nealian letters or cursive taught before print. In some cases, using any of the above instead of standard manuscript first has been shown to interfere with children learning how to read, since they are having to learn two very different appearances of the same letters while trying to learn to read. In addition, there has been no research to support the claim that italic or D'Nealian creates a smoother transition to cursive, as was the orginal intent of creating these handwriting fonts. They are pretty, though!
Some children never have problems with D'Nealian or cursive first, but some may. Some children (especially girls) may add their own style to whatever style you teach them, and that's okay, too, if it doesn't interfere with legibility. But when teaching how to write, sometimes it's better to go with a more basic style to help prevent reversals and then when they are confident in their writing, they may add their own "curliques" and such.
Also, I have never used A Reason For...Handwriting, but I have looked at sample pages. They use some dashed letters. A simple solution would be for you to trace over the letter with a gray crayon, showing your child how to properly write the letter, and then let them trace over your tracing.
Hope this helps!
God bless!
Delia
I found them online inexpensively. If it doesn't work for us, then we can always switch over to HWOT. I didn't even know about ARFH until I looked to see what Carrie recommended. My son is going to start LHTH but is enjoying handwriting practice so I'd like to get him going with that too.
