A-Z Mat Man and Me: Teacher's Guide

Mat Man® is the cute and clever mascot that shows up repeatedly in the elementary material from Handwriting Without Tears. Built from the program's letter strokes with its "mat" for a body, Mat Man's limbs and head look unsurprisingly like the Capital Wood Pieces®. His happily whimsical facial expressions communicate over-and-over again that learning – particularly learning to read and write – is FUN! These Mat Man® and Me literacy materials from HWOT are just the latest example.

Components include Mat Man® and the Great Alphabet Parade (a brightly colorful, read-aloud alphabet book), the Individual Reader Set (26 beginning readers with Family Guide), a Teacher Guide, and two practice workbooks which are coordinated with the HWOT kindergarten and first grade levels – Practice for Emerging Readers and Practice for Developing Readers. These practice workbooks provide pages that correlate to each Reader. In addition, there are packages that include combinations of these components.

Completely interconnected with the HWOT program, Readers incorporate the handwriting style in terms of letter presentation and the Practice Workbooks provide letter stroke instruction and HWOT's distinctive writing lines. The Emerging Readers workbook sports the orange color associated with the kindergarten program, while Developing Readers has the first-grade color of yellow. The two workbooks are similar to each other with letter, word, and/or sentence copywork plus an Understanding the Story segment for each book. These segments cover events, setting, and characters from the story. The Teacher Guide provides lesson plans that weave the components together emphasizing letter learning and comprehension (meaning making).

This series is an engaging introduction to letters and letter sounds. Although coordinated with both the Kindergarten and First Grade level of HWOT, you would most likely use it with one OR the other level. Unless your student needed the content repetition, you would not use them sequentially. ~ Janice