Handwriting Without Tears....yes it is possible!

For many handwriting is a constant struggle.  If you're a student (or adult) who has struggled with handwriting or are a parent/teacher that has struggled with teaching handwriting...I have the answer and it is appropriately named "Handwriting Without Tears".  At The Capitol School we use this program throughout our "elementary" age classrooms and I think it is by far the best handwriting curriculum out there!

Jan Olsen

The HWT curriculum was developed in 2008 by occupational therapist, Jan Olsen.  The short version of how Jan developed such an amazing curriculum is that when her child was growing up she noticed his poor handwriting was not improving the older he got.  So Jan took matters into her own hands!  Using what she knew as an occupational therapist she began teaching her son how to write.  His handwriting improved so much that other parents in the surrounding areas began sending their children to Jan.  Years (and lots of research) later Jan developed Handwriting Without Tears.  You can learn more about Jan and the entire HWT curriculum by visiting the HWT website here.



What I love about HWT is that it's not simply another group of workbooks for you to copy page after page for your student to do.  Yes there are workbooks, but it is so much more than just workbooks.

Book 1: Orange

Book 2: Yellow

In our classroom we use the first two books in the elementary series.  If we were graded this
would be Kindergarten and First grade.  I love how the books are not labeled by a certain grade level.  This keeps students from focusing on what "grade" or "level" they are in.  Our class knows that everyone has to first complete the orange book before they can move on to the yellow book.  The orange book begins with printing capital letters and then moves to lower case and numbers.  The yellow book continues with lower case letters, but then progresses to having the students write sentences and paragraphs using both lower and upper case letters.

sample workbook page

  One of the things I really love about these workbooks is that they are both right-hand and left-hand friendly.  Unlike traditional workbook pages where the letter will be written on the left side; HWT books have the letter written all across the line so that students that are left handed or right handed can look at the letter they are making.  Wow that sounds really confusing.....the picture on the left is an example, but it might be difficult to see.  From personal experience...teaching HWT to a lefty is just as easy as teaching it to a righty!

using play dough to help create letters

Since I teach students ages 5-7, one of the most basic and most common reasons why I have students that struggle with writing is due to their lack of fine motor skills. HWT addresses this in a variety of ways.  Besides just doing out work books, the students use chalk, sponges, play dough, wooden letters, and even dancing to learn about handwriting.  When the students use play dough not only are they learning about what the letters look like & what they are called, but they also help work those fine motor skills!

wet, dry, try

Another teaching tool we use is called "wet, dry, try".  Here students take a small wet sponge and make a letter on their small chalk boards. Then the students take a small rolled up piece of paper towel and trace over the letter (dry) they just made with their wet sponge.  Finally the students "try" by taking a small piece of chalk and writing the letter on their chalk boards.  This is a wonderful tool that the students LOVE to do.  It is also a wonderful opportunity for the teacher to observe how the students are making their letters.  I can get my students to write the letter W for 20 minuets using this method.....not so much if it was just a pencil and a piece of paper!

The wooden block pieces are another great tool in this curriculum.  The block pieces come in 4 basic shapes: big curve, little curve, big line, and little line.  By combining these 4 simple shapes you can make just about all of the letters in the alphabet.  This vocabulary (big line, little line, big curve, little curve) also goes directly with the work books and is shown at the top of each page.  For example; to make an E you need one big line and three little lines.  This really does help the students when you are trying to explain to them exactly how a letter is formed.

we love our HWT CD

And finally probably my favorite aspect of this curriculum is the wonderful CDs.  The Rock, Rap, Tap & Learn CD is the one that I use most in my classroom.  It is a proven fact that children (and adults) can remember things better when there is music involved.  When I was 4 years old our Sunday school teacher...who happened to be my sweet mother.....taught our class the books of the Bible by singing them to us.  Even now at 25 when the preacher ask us to turn to the book of Ezra I sing the song in my head....because seriously who remembers where that book is!  Well learning about handwriting is no different.  If you walk into my classroom and ask the question "Where do you start your letters?" my entire class will yell back "at the top".  Why?  Because there is a song called "Where do you start your letters?"

Well that is the brief explanation of HWT....I know what you're thinking....that wasn't brief!  I went to an entire seminar on HWT

Around the classroom!

Unlike most classrooms that are in buildings that are designed specifically for schools our classroom is a little different.  Our classroom is located on Capitol Park in downtown Tuscaloosa in the oldest wooden structure building in Tuscaloosa county.  So our classroom might look a little "different", but I love it and think it gives our room a lot of character!  Another aspect I love about our room is when you walk in your focus is not immediately drawn to the building, but rather the students!

Calendar Area

When you first walk into our classroom this is the wall on the left.  It is our "calendar area".  In addition to the calendar, we keep track of the weather, how many days we've been in school, and we have a daily schedule posted.  Due to the numerous activities our school offers, our class schedule is different each day so having the daily schedule posted helps keep the students (and us teachers!) on track!




To the right when you walk in our classroom you will find one of our "shelf work" areas.  Since we teach all of our students individually, and do a lot of small group activities, we have a lot of work set up in the classroom that the students can work on independently.  This allows all of the students to be working, while Margaret and I pull individuals or small groups of students to work on specific areas they need help with.  Even though all of our activities are not 100% Montessori, a lot of our activities follow several of the Montessori principles.  For example with shelf work....the work is on trays and the students pick up a tray, take it to their seat, do the work, and when they are finished the put all the work back on the tray and return it to its "home".

shelf work area

On another wall we have our classroom "library".  Here we have several books from picture books, to leveled readers etc.  Each day we read with each child individually.  This is a very important part of our day and we feel it plays a vital role in students learning to read or further developing their reading abilities.  Each year we teach a wide range of students with a wide range of reading abilities.  This year, for example, we have some students that were still learning all of the letters to some students that are reading on 5th, 6th, and 7th grade.  We guide the children to the right range of books by telling them to pick a book that's "not too hard and not too easy", but they get to choose the actual book.  This can become a challenge for some of our more advanced readers.  Even though some of our students are reading on a 7th grade reading level....they are still six or seven years old and therefore still enjoy reading books geared for that age.  In this we try to compromise between having them read books that challenge them and ones that interest them.  We want our students to not only read well, but to love reading.  We don't ever want reading to feel like a hardship for the students.  

our class books

Our Montessori bead cabinet

This is a picture of our Montessori bead cabinet.  I won't go into much detail here because I am going to save our Montessori items for another post, but we use this for teaching math.  It is fantastic and the kids seem to really enjoy using it!

On the back wall of our classroom we have our computers and T.V.  We have six Mac computers that the students use each day.  Not only do the students love working on the computers, but there are such great websites that are available now that the internet has become such a great teaching tool.  One website that the students use each day is called Raz-Kidz.  The school has a subscription to this website and it is a great reading tool.  The students can read books, have books read to them and take post "test" to see if the students are comprehending what they are reading.  Our T.V was recently donated to our classroom and it is a great teaching tool.  The T.V is connected to the internet so we are able to show online videos.  For example this month, January, we have been learning about snowflakes. The students were able to watch a great video about the book Snowflake Bentley (the man that first took microscopic pictures of snowflakes).

World Rug Area

Our room makes an L shape and this is the bottom of the L part of our room.  It is hard to tell in this picture but there is a large rug on the floor that has a map of the world on it.  We call this area the "world rug".  This space is used for when we have "class meetings" or read our lifeskill books together.  In the back left corner we have a large block table where the students can play with wooden block.  To the right is the bathroom and sink area.

And that is a tour of our classroom!  Sorry if some of the of the pictures seem blurry.  I took them on my phone while trying to keep the kids out of the pictures so it was a bit difficult!

Multiple Intelligence

As I begin this blog and a thousand ideas run through my head.....well maybe not a thousand, but I have a pretty long list of topics already.....I tried to think of where to start.  I good place to start is the beginning.  Don't worry I won't bore you with stories of my days at Capitol School when Mrs. Hill was Miss Brown and I was a little girl...well little in age...I was still a head taller that everyone back then!  Instead I would like to start with the foundation of our school.  At the Capitol School we function on the basis of Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligence.  The phrase "Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligence"is a phrase that I have heard since I was 7 years old.  But, as I have learned, not everyone is as familiar with this terminology as I am.

Howard Gardner

Without going into too much detail, Howard Gardner was a professor at Harvard University that developed what he called "multiple intelligence". So far (and I say so far because Dr. Gardner himself believes there could be more) there are 8 intelligences; intrapersonal, interpersonal, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalist, musical, and visual-spatial.  I found this picture describing the different multiple intelligences and thought it did a great job explaining what each one was.  Basically, we at The Capitol School believe that there are numerous, or multiple :), was in which a person can be smart!  So we educate students in all areas of intelligence and you would be surprised at how easy it is to tell which intelligences the students have and maybe which ones are not their favorites! It really is that simple!  Four times a year we (the teachers) compile a portfolio for each child that contains samples of work from each of the 8 intelligences.  This gives the parents to not only see their child's progress, but it also is a great tool in determining which of the intelligences seem to be the student's strengths.  In other words it was pretty easy for my parents to see when I brought home my first portfolio, back when I was 7, that visual-spatial is NOT one of my intelligences.  Let's just say I heard a lot of "that's a great picture of a horse Hannah"...when in fact my mom was looking at a self-portrait I did in art class that week!  So that pretty much sums it up!  I'll try and post a blog at another time about the details and day-to-day activities of our cluster.....and I guess in that one I should include why we're grouped by clusters!

For more information about Howard Gardner or MI this books is wonderful!

I'll close with a quote that I believes describes our school perfectly:

"We find out how a child is smart...not how smart is a child."

Beginning of Hill/Box Cluster Blog

Welcome to my blog!  My name is Hannah Box and I am currently the co-teacher of the Hill/Box cluster at The Capitol School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.  Our school is a wonderful private school founded on Harvard professor Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligence.  We strive to teach all students individually based on all areas of multiple intelligence.  The purpose of this blog is to not only document what happens in our classroom, but also about all things education!  Enjoy!