When talking about handwriting in recent years, Handwriting Without Tears seems to be the elephant in the room that we're constantly avoiding mentioning. While it's true we don't carry it, we do believe the series has some excellent merits and it is worth making you aware of them. At the same time, we believe it has a couple of drawbacks for Christian homeschoolers and want you to be aware of those as well.
HWT is a multisensory handwriting curriculum that makes use of a variety of tools to teach kids using touch and feel, a logical sequence of instruction that reduces confusion and a simplified cursive that eliminates much of the difficulty associated with the transition from manuscript to cursive.
How Does This Work?
There are basically three phases to the Handwriting with Tears approach, the Kindergarten phase, the Manuscript phase and the Cursive phase.
[UNFINISHED REVIEW]
Our Honest Opinion
As stated before, we don't carry this curriculum, although we're happy to take used copies of current books in. While we acknowledge there are some excellent strengths to the program, we've got enough reservations about it that we've currently decided against offering the series. Our main beef with the program, to be frank, is a personal dislike of the end result; aesthetically, we find HWT's cursive quite ugly and don't see the point in spending all the time to perfect that style.
- Kids are really young and this provides an easy way to get started. (Just wait and let them be little kids a while longer!)
- This program has no Christian references. (Now, we have nothing in particular against HWT because it doesn't have Christian references; that doesn't bother us. What does bother us is people wanting it in particular because it does not have them; that, to our minds, should not be THE reason to choose a handwriting curriculum.)
If your kids are a little older and have special difficulties, this approach can work really well.
Samples:
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Manuscript
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Cursive
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