The Teacher's Alphabet joins STEEM

How to Improve Handwriting Quickly and Easily

If you have ever tried to help children print better, you know, it's usually a struggle. First, most kids will tell you they already “know” how to make their letters and numbers. Unfortunately, this is true. . . even though they really do not know.

They don't want you to tell them that their "good enough" letters are just okay, or could look a lot better, or should be much better.Unfortunately for most children, most children write before they are ready. 4 year olds really want to learn to write!!. They will start with or without adult direction.

If you are lucky enough to get to teach them when they are 4-5 years old--this is the "Golden Time" --the time they are they are educationally at their best for learning phonics, mathematics, and making their letters and numbers.
In most classrooms, kids are shown what the letters look like, told to copy them and that's it. So kids teach themselves to print in a way that makes sense to them. Kids make "good enough" letters and everyone pretends that that is okay. Most children are in pre-K with "educational babysitters," well meaning but unqualified and not trained. Then they practice over and over incorrectly, until they get really good at doing it wrong, and they don't want to change it!

As qualified and credentialed teachers, when we taught our 18 very bright 4 to 5 year olds, we realized the regular way of teaching kids to print, using an alphabetical teaching order and 3 lines, was educationally and developmentally unsound. The skills learned to make a capital A did not carry over to making a capital B. The approximation skills necessary to guess where a "under the Top Line" capital C starts, are for third graders not Kindergartners! These kids really needed some new lines! 4, 5, and 6 year olds are concrete learners--they need to see it not imagine it. Fractional parts are for 4th grade minds to imagine--not concrete thinking (SHOW ME) 5 year olds.

The kids were right! The A-B-C teaching order didn't make sense. Instead of building skills, we were ignoring the skills taught from the previous letter in order to make the next new letter. So we started over and asked ourselves, "What is the simplest letter and how can it be made? What letters are related to it? What skills are
required to make the letters well, and is there a way that we can put them in an order so that the kids master the easiest easiest skills first? And how can we teach them in an order that lets kids be more successful and builds their confidence as well as growing their skills with less frustration ?
(Foundation Exercises are marked in Pink and Directional Groups are numbered in Blue.)
The answer we developed with our students was The Teachers Alphabet. Our 10 Foundation Exercises and 11 Directional Letter Groups are arranged in a progressive teaching order that starts with the easiest to make letters and builds their skills as the letters get harder. Most importantly, our system builds real confidence in young learners because it builds real skills!

Kids love it because it makes sense when they look at it, builds their confidence, and its helps them become better printers very quickly. Plus, with our 5 line (Special Spot Lines) format everyone finally knows where all the curved letters start and end.

After the Teacher's Manual was written, we were able to design our student workbooks by working with real students and carefully noting which shapes and exercises gave them the most trouble. In some cases, we realize that certain exercises needed more than one page of examples to practice and some shapes need more examples to trace on the same page.

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[The Teacher's Alphabet] (http://theteachersalphabet.com)