‘Handwriting Without Tears’ program seeks to resuscitate atrophying practice of good penmanship
By: Allison Musante
In this digital age when children seem to know more about computers than adults, the skill of handwriting seems to be on its way to extinction. However, occupational therapists have sparked a renewed interest in handwriting that has local educators, parents and children practicing penmanship this summer.
Teachers from the Princeton area recently attended a "Handwriting Without Tears" workshop in South Brunswick to learn the program’s method of teaching handwriting.
During the workshop teachers learned the program’s method of using music, singing, and movement patterns to teach handwriting to pre-school and kindergarten children.
"Children are all about movement and discovery," said Tania Ferrandino, an occupational therapist, handwriting educational expert and national promoter of the Handwriting Without Tears program. She emphasized that the program uses multi-sensory techniques designed to help children make handwriting a natural and automatic skill.
She explained that most teachers teach handwriting by dictating direction, specifically by showing children how to form letters. The problem is that the teachers do not understand the developmental process of handwriting and children fail to understand the meaning of letters, leading to problems like letter reversals.
Currently, New Jersey curriculum standards include lessons on handwriting from kindergarten through high school. However, more emphasis appears to be placed on sentence construction, grammar and spelling after second grade. In third grade and beyond, the curriculum requires only that students "write legibly in manuscript or cursive to meet district standards" but does not specify a standardized method of teaching penmanship.
"We want teachers to teach in the hands-on method," Ms. Ferrandino said. She said the workshop has "empowered" teachers, who are confidently returning to their schools to teach handwriting and spread the word to administrators about the success of the system.
"Our goal is to try to get it used across the board," she said, adding that 14 states have adopted the system as its handwriting curriculum.
Sharyn Rudofsky, an occupational therapist with a practice in Princeton called Occupational Therapy Associates of Princeton, is teaching summer camps in handwriting skills with her partners Gilda Rivera and Sarah Seemann.
The camp will divide the children into three age groups: pre-school, kindergarten and older children learning cursive. The groups will be small and meet once a week for an hour where they will practice writing with sensory motor activities.
Ms. Rudofsky and Ms. Rivera also co-founded The Write Time, a lecture and workshop for educators that explains the multisensory, development method of teaching handwriting.
"It’s a great program and really effective because of the way it’s taught," Ms. Rudofsky said. "It just makes so much sense, it’s so practical, and it’s much more effective."
Despite the convenience of computers, occupational therapists say that parents and educators should care about penmanship for a number of reasons. In fact, poor handwriting is the top reason that children are referred to an occupational therapist, above attention deficit disorder, according to Ms. Rudofsky.
"Good handwriting affects all areas of the classroom," Ms. Ferrandino said. "A better understanding of the mechanics of writing makes reading easier, leads to better fluency in language, and improves math skills."
Occupational therapists have also noticed that children with poor penmanship tend to have low self-esteem because they feel they cannot express themselves through writing, according to Ms. Rudofsky.
But poor penmanship does not only affect the individual.
According to a 1992 article in American Demographics magazine, the Writing Instrument Manufactures Association of Marlton reported that businesses lose over $200 million a year because of employees’ illegible handwriting. Kodak lost time and money when it could not return over 400,000 rolls of film with unreadable addresses. The U.S. Postal Service has had to employ handwriting experts to decipher handwritten envelopes, and spends $4 million a year to send nearly 38 million pieces of mail to its dead-letter office.
Poor penmanship can also put lives at risk. Doctors with poor handwriting put clients at risk when they send barely legible prescriptions to pharmacies, causing dangerous medication mistakes.
Ms. Ferrandino said adults have taken the Handwriting Without Tears workshop and added "it is never too late" to improve one’s handwriting.

