Review of handwriting without tears program

My First School Book , the preschool level workbook, teaches pencil grip, uppercase letter formation, number formation, colors, and shapes. But most of the book is dedicated to uppercase letter formation lowercase letters are taught in the kindergarten level. Letter formation is taught in developmental, rather than alphabetical, order.

Handwriting Without Tears is intended to be a multisensory curriculum. There are a number of additional products you can purchase to allow the student to have hands-on activities to learn letter and number and letter formation, as well as CDs with learning songs. I followed the suggested lesson plan the first time I used the pre-k curriculum, and have pared it down this second time around.

If used as suggested — doing a couple of activities per day with your student that may include multi-sensory play or workbook work — this curriculum should last for the entire school year. Read about how to help a student correct their pencil grip. Study the lesson plan and consider if you want to use it or make changes. Also plan how you want to store the various elements of the curriculum.

Finally, the child is taught to check his own work. After he has checked his work, he enjoys coloring in the small pictures on the page as a treat for his hard work. The Kindergarten level teaches capital letter formation first, and has kids writing in all caps for the first half of the year. However, Handwriting Without Tears says teaching capitals first is important for a few reasons.

First, capitals are easier to form, and the program is written developmentally, so easier to learn letters are taught before the harder to learn letters using the Handwriting Without Tears Winning Order.

Capital letters all start at the top, they are all the same height, and they are all easy to differentiate and identity. Lowercase letters are a different story, they have more than one starting location, they are not the same size, and many letters, like p, d, b and q are difficult for a small child to differentiate.

They do have a point here. I have not seen a single reversal from my child when he is writing the Handwriting Without Tears capital letters, however, he is now writing his name with a combination of lowercase and uppercase letters, when before we started, it was correctly written with a starting capital and lowercase letters this was the only word he knew how to write before starting this program.

After the first half of the year, lower case letters are introduced. Here comes the pitch. Hit the ball, wait, then run the bases. In my home especially, Handwriting Without Tears was a big hit because it taught me how to work with my left-handed child. The workbook is set up with frequent example letters, both on the left and right of the page, so both left and write handed children can see the sample where a typical handwriting workbook only has one sample, on the left, which a left handed child would block while writing.

The workbook lies completely flat on the table which allows for stress free learning for Mr. I also enjoyed being able to access the online printable resources which allowed me to print practice pages. I was able to print extra worksheets with his name, as well as his spelling list and reading words from his other lessons.

In the 6 weeks I used this program Mr. Man went from only being able to write his name, to being able to form the capital letters correctly. He has gained confidence, and will now write simple words with ease. I am so proud of the progress he has made, and am so impressed with this program that we will continue using it with him for the foreseeable future.

An important question has been whether one type of curriculum-based handwriting intervention outperforms the others. In other words, does it matter which curriculum a school uses? From our comparison of effect sizes, no one handwriting program appeared to outperform the other programs across all domains. Intriguingly, the Write Start program and the explicit handwriting program from Kaiser et al.

However, other programs had medium to large effect sizes in each of those domains just not consistently across domains. Therefore, different programs may excel at targeting different outcomes. In an ideal situation, the needs of the children in the classroom would dictate which curriculum is used. For example, our results suggest that SMHP may be best for classrooms for which the primary goal is legibility but not speed. Alternatively, for classrooms for which the primary goal is handwriting speed, the explicit handwriting program from Kaiser et al.

We also used the effect sizes to examine the ideal length of intervention, and we found that more intervention hours did not appear to lead to substantially larger handwriting improvements. This finding suggests that 6 wk of intervention may be sufficient, even though a previous review of curriculum-based and non-curriculum-based handwriting interventions suggested that handwriting interventions should occur at least two times per week for a minimum of 20 sessions to be effective Hoy et al.

Interestingly, we found that the grade at which the intervention occurred had a nonsignificant but medium to large relation to how big the intervention-based legibility effects were, which suggests a trend for older grades to be associated with larger effects.

Although this association was not statistically significant and should be interpreted with extreme caution, the size of the effects for different ages and grades might be useful in designing future research.

A limitation of this review is that no Level I studies met inclusion criteria, restricting our ability to draw firm conclusions on the efficacy of curriculum-based handwriting interventions. The lack of Level I studies may be attributable to the fact that curriculum-based interventions, by definition, take place in the classroom, preventing random assignment of students to one condition or another.

However, a large-scale study that randomly assigns different classrooms to the intervention or control condition would provide higher levels of evidence in support of curriculum-based interventions. Another limitation is that our calculation of effect sizes did not account for repeated measures, which may have led to decreased estimates of effect sizes. We chose this as a conservative approach, but some of the effects may be underestimated.

Other limitations include inconsistency in definitions of handwriting components e. The results of this study have the following implications for occupational therapy practice:.

Curriculum-based handwriting programs, in general, appear to successfully target legibility in preschool, kindergarten, and young school-age children. Specific curriculum-based handwriting programs may be better at targeting speed than legibility or vice versa and ideally should be selected on the basis of whether the primary need of the classroom is handwriting speed or legibility.

However, children with handwriting challenges may need more time. Future research is needed to determine the ideal length of curriculum-based handwriting programs. A key need exists for future Level I research to examine curriculum-based handwriting. We thank Karla Ausderau and Lauren Bishop-Fitzpatrick for their insights and help with this systematic review. We also thank Michael Venner for his expertise and assistance with our database search.

Travers, Brittany G. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Am J Occup Ther. Published online Mar Travers Brittany G. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer.

This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract Challenges with handwriting can have a negative impact on academic performance, and these challenges are commonly addressed by occupational therapy practitioners in school settings.

Table 1. Open in a separate window. Method Search Strategy We conducted a systematic search of the literature to identify curriculum-based handwriting interventions for children.

Figure 1. Selection Criteria Articles selected for review included those that had used handwriting interventions and curriculum-based programs for children in preschool through fifth grade. Results From the original search, we identified studies matching our search terms. Effects of Level II Versus Level III Studies Because Level III studies, by definition, do not have a control group, pre—post treatment effect sizes may be overestimated because they likely reflect not only improvements from the intervention but also maturation effects and benefits from completing the same or a similar measure twice.

Handwriting Speed. Handwriting Fluency. Effects of Specific Curricula We compared effect sizes for legibility and speed across the different curricula see Figure 2. Figure 2. Instruction Length. Discussion This systematic review aimed to examine the evidence for curriculum-based handwriting interventions to improve handwriting legibility, speed, and fluency. Efficacy of Curriculum-Based Handwriting Interventions The findings suggest that curriculum-based handwriting interventions can successfully elicit small- to medium-sized improvements in legibility.

Program Characteristics That Demonstrated the Highest Efficacy We calculated effect sizes for all studies in the systematic review to supplement our interpretation of the literature.

Limitations A limitation of this review is that no Level I studies met inclusion criteria, restricting our ability to draw firm conclusions on the efficacy of curriculum-based handwriting interventions.

Implications for Occupational Therapy Practice The results of this study have the following implications for occupational therapy practice: Curriculum-based handwriting programs, in general, appear to successfully target legibility in preschool, kindergarten, and young school-age children. I have been told from many experienced teachers that this is a great program to implement with my kiddos.

I would love to win this to use with my kiddos on a regular basis, even as a station in my center rotations. I work with students with autism and recently read a research article that studied using HTW with these students to good success. I am a newly graduated OTA student so the funds are low and I would love to have this to work with my kiddos is therapy and help them learn. You are awesome with your tips and reviews. They are greatly appreciated! I would love to win so I could give this material to a teacher that told me she has never heard of Handwriting Without Tears before.

This hands-on program would really help her and her students. I would give her the APP too, because several of her students use the i-Pad as their preferred tool. I am an early primary teacher always looking for multi-sensory and developmentally appropriate ways to help kids learn to write. I spent the last two years working with children with autism in my classroom and am looking for ways to make my classroom more inclusive of their special needs.

A program like this would help me better reach my students at their level, and make learning to write more exciting. I work with a special education teacher who could use this with the kids to help with their handwriting and letter recognition. I am a level 2 OT student working in peds setting. I have seen the benefits of handwriting without tears and hope to utilize it in my future as a peds OT. Having a kit of my own would be a great jump start!

I absolutely love this kit. I am starting a job in February working with children. I am a fairly new therapist so would benefits so so much from this tool. I would love to get the kit to South Africa, as I have not seen it used here. I am a special education teacher and I use HWT with my 4th and 5th grade students with intensive special needs. Our class would benefit from having a classroom kit and the app my IPAD.

I would love to have these activities to use with all of the students in my room. It would provide activities for many different developmental stages.

I had a set of the wooden pieces and a chalk board for the wet, dry, try, in a previous classroom I worked in, but I need a new set for a class of 5 year old Autistic classroom, This program works great with all kids, but especially with students who have special needs. I am hoping to get my teachers to start using it for their handwriting instruction. I have to purchase all of the resources, therefore winning this would be awesome to add to my therapy supplies. I know for a fact it would get tons of use as most of my kiddos are at the age where they are learning to write.

Happy teaching everyone! I am an OT who uses this program almost daily! I love it and would really be interested in having another set to help my inclusion lessons!!

Love everything about this program!! I have been trying to do similar things with my kids, but it would be nice to have the real HWT materials! I would love this for my 4-year-old! My daughter is a COTA and uses this in her job. I would love to have a set for myself to use with my grandaughter. During conferences this past week, it became clear that many of the parents believe that learning the ABC song is equivalent to learning letter names and sounds. In this world of Common Core Standards, my little ones are at a significant disadvantage.

Handwriting Without Tears looks like the perfect program for helping my students develop the skills they are lacking through engaging and low stress activities. I so need this for my 4yr old and my 2yr will follow! I have heard so many good things about this program. What a great program! Thank you so much for this review. Working in schools, I have seen the frustration that learning to write can cause, as well as the frustrations of students trying to unlearn bad writing habits.

This program certainly looks like it could solve a lot of problems! It is such an ingenius, fun way to teach handwriting! I absolutely love handwriting without tears. I am a certified teacher so I have been wanting to get this for her. My baby boy would be able to enjoy it to when he gets a little bigger.

This would be great to do with my 3 yo. She is SO not interested in writing her letters yet, so maybe this would get her there! This would be great to do with my 3 year old. She is SO not interested in writing her letters right now! I would love to win any of these for our Headstart classroom. The kids would so enjoy these activities! Would love to try this with my 3 year old! She is so interested in starting writing and I want to make sure she is learning it well.

I have used HWT in my resource room for over two years. I love it! MatMan is great. I also really like all the songs that are used with it. I am an SLP and work with preschoolers. I have surface knowledge of HWT, and I would love to learn more with some new materials!! I hope I win mamaOT! I am certified! I love this program and have had great success! Especially with using Mat Man for body awareness and the wooden sticks for everything!

I would like to win this because I am always giving away to the parents supplies for this program out of my pocket! Would love to win this to better help at home my son who receives OT in school. Have heard great things about program. I have used this program with my kindergarten students and they really like it, especially Mat Man. My son is going to be headed to pre-K shortly and would love this to be a part of his transition. I work in a moderate to severe kindergarten-first grade class.

We struggle to teach the children the correct way to form letters of their names each day. It would be nice to have a permanent set for my class.

This would really help me and my future students as our school system lacks much resources in this side of the world! This seems like a great tool that every therapist and parents should have in their bags of trick when it comes to handwriting. I love HWT program. My students love the app and building shapes and letters with the wooden pieces. I watch the amazing K teachers at my school use this program and would love to have it for my 3 girls home!