Handwriting Without Tears & Show and Share

Starting next week, we will begin learning to write our capital letters! 

Logic says you start teaching the letters in alphabetical order, but not with HWT!  The letters are taught developmentally, instead, and straight lines are much easier for the children to make than curves or verticals. We will learn to write our letters starting with our "big lines" (in HWT terminology). We will not learn the letters with curves or diagonals until later in the year. 

We only teach the children how to make uppercase letters in HWT. The reason for this is it is much easier for a child to grasp the space of an uppercase letter. They are all the same height, and contain the same space. When you write lowercase letters, you have to know which letters only go in the bottom half of the space, which hang off the bottom, etc. We will still write in upper and lower case in the room and on their papers, we will teach them how to write their own names in with just a capital letter at the beginning, and will learn to match upper and lowercase letters in centers and games, but the workbooks focus on capitals only. There will be things your child will miss if they do not come every day, but we save the workbooks for Thursdays when all the children are present. 

We will focus on one letter each week, writing them in sand or shaving cream, making them with play dough, etc, and then finally writing them on paper in our HWT workbooks. Then on Thursday of that week the kids will find something from home to bring in that starts with the beginning letter sound of our letter of the week. If there is ever a week that is tough, you can always bring something in that is our color of the week. If the kids don't know what color we're working on that week, you can always look in the circle-time area. The color will be posted there. 

The children should come home with things during the week that you'll know the letter we are working on, but if you would like to reference our schedule, here is a list of upcoming weeks:

October 14-17 - Letter L
October 21-24 - Letter F
October 28-31 - Letter E
November 4-7 Letter H
November 18-21 - Letter T
November 25-27 - Letter I

Now that we're starting our capital letters, each week's Bible story and Bible verse will also begin with our letter of the week. 

Next week's Bible story will be "Loaves and Fishes" and our Bible verse is, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind" (Matthew 22:37).