This detailed and easy-to-use Readiness & Writing Teacher’s Guide from Handwriting Without Tears® provides step-by-step directions for laying a firm foundation in beginning writing skills. You’ll find a plethora of helps to guide your students from prewriting skills starting with crayon use to pictures, colors, and shapes. The first 4 sections provide teacher support and teaching method explanations and walk you through teaching crayon grip, building shapes, reviewing colors, and other prewriting skills. Students will then begin with capital letters (ordered by shape) and then move to counting and numbers.
This guide provides easy-to-use and detailed teacher instructions for using the My First School Book and My First Lowercase Book. Monitor your student’s progress with the provided benchmarks in foundation skills, readiness and writing skills, language and literacy skills, numbers/math skills, sensory motor skills, and interpersonal skills.
You’ll have the tools you need to guide your child step-by-step from prewriting skills (such as following patterns, making strokes, or drawing inside shapes) to beginning handwriting instruction. Beginning with foundational skills, including shapes and colors, it then progresses to writing capital letters. The year ends with six weeks of lowercase using the My First Lowercase Book (not available separately). All concepts are taught and reinforced using multisensory activities, manipulatives, drawing skills, and more. For each lesson, the Teacher’s Guide shows a reduced student’s page and provides a teacher oral script, a learning activity, vocabulary words, a list of skills your student is learning, and more. Once you understand this program’s unique methodology, the daily lessons are low-prep, but do require high teacher/student interaction—made straightforward with the Teacher’s Guide. Add the Hands-On Learning Pack with My First Book Set for one student. Depending on your student’s needs or learning styles, you may want to add other manipulatives suggested in this guide. For each additional student, you’ll need the My First Book consumable set.
Note: Throughout this guide, references are made to the Get Set for School Sing Along songs being available in the “Interactive Digital Teaching Tool” (IDTT). This digital tool is designed for school districts’ large classroom purposes (available directly from Learning Without Tears). For individual students and homeschool use, this guide, used along with the Hands-On Learning Pack, provides all the instruction and helps you’ll need. The Get Set for School music is still available as a separate CD or for free on YouTube®. For PK use, this curriculum also suggests Roll-a-Dough Letters and Stamp and See Screen. Spiral-bound, 254 pgs, sc. ~ Ruth