In this class I will customize our session to best meet the needs of your child.  Depending on what you want for your child our first session will either be a Reading Assessment or we will begin with the letter F for Handwriting Without Tears.

I was trained by Learning Without Tears to use their curriculum Handwriting Without Tears.  I have also been trained by Zoo Phonics to use their curriculum.  Given my experience as a former preschool teacher, Kindergarten teacher, and 4th grade teacher, as well as my experience teaching all ages on Outschool for the past 5 years I am confident in my abilities to create my own curriculum for beginning reading, for instance, blending, segmenting, rhyming, alliteration, syllables, deletion, and addition of phonemes.  


******HANDWRITING WITHOUT TEARS******
Handwriting Without Tears curriculum follows a unique pattern in which the letters are taught by how they are written as opposed to alphabetical order.  The letters are grouped as follows:
*Frog Jump Capitals (F, E, D, P, B, R, N, M): These letters all start in the top left corner with a big line on the left, and a frog jump back up to the top left corner. When the first line is on the left, the next part is on the right side. This prevents reversals, while teaching good stroke habits.
*Starting Corner Capitals (H, K, L, U, V, W, X, Y, Z): These letters all start on the left and use the left-to-right formation habit. Printing follows the same order as reading (top-to-bottom and left-to-right).
*Center Starters (C, O, Q, G, S, A, I, T, J): These letters start at the center of the top and the letters C, O, Q, and G start with the Magic C stroke. Learners will form good habits with C, O, S, T, and J that will make learning c, o, s, t, and j much easier! There will be no problems with stroke direction or reversals.
*Same as Capitals (c, o, s, v, w, t): The first 5 letters are exactly like their capitals, just smaller. Lowercase t is made like T, it’s just crossed lower.
*Magic C Lowercase (a, d, g): These high frequency letters begin with the familiar Magic C stroke.
*More Vowels (u, i, e): Here are the rest of the vowels.  The focus will be on careful placement and size.
*Transition Group (l, k, y, j): These letters are familiar from capitals. The focus will also be on careful placement and size.
*Diver Letters (p, r, n, m, h, b): These letters start with the same pattern: dive down, come up, swim over!  We avoid b and d confusion by separating the letters and teaching them in different groups.
*Final Group (f, q, x, z): The letter f has a tricky start. Letter q is taught here to avoid confusion with the letter g.  Letters x and z are familiar, but infrequently used.

Why learn capital letters before lowercase letters? Children who learn capitals first, also learn 3 things: 1. Start the letters at the top.  2. Use the correct stroke sequence to form letters.  3. Orient letters and numbers correctly - no reversals!  Think about it, c, o, s, v, w, x, y, and z are the same as their capitals; j, k, t, and u are also similar to their capital partners.  After learning the proper strokes to write capitals, learners will be prepared to write nearly half of the lowercase alphabet.



******ZOO PHONICS******
Zoo Phonics is learned through repetition starting with lowercase letters then uppercase letters.  Letter sounds are also taught before letter names because we use the sounds to read and spell not the letter names.  Letter names often have a sound of their own, unlike the sound it actually makes in a word, for example, "c" in cat.  We will not focus on the letter names in this class because this would be introducing yet another sound thus confusing your child.  Zoo-Phonics firmly believes that letter names and capital letters are secondary in importance in early literacy.

Using animals like the ones in the Zoo-Phonics curriculum helps students remember the shapes and the sounds of the letters.  The animals in this curriculum take on the shape of the coinciding letter.  The shapes also help learners know where to start the letter when they begin writing the letters.  Zoo-Phonics also incorporates movement which helps cement the information into memory.  The animal names   When students hear, see, say, and do they remember 70-100% of the given information, whereas, when a learner only hears the information, they only retain 10%, when they hear and see they retain 30%, and when they hear, see, and say the retain only 40%.  

To combine these two programs I recommend following Handwriting Without Tears curriculum and adding in the phonics portion of Handwriting Without Tears. Marilyn Jaeger Adams states, "In respect to teaching uppercase and lowercase letters, current learning theory holds only one suggestion...Teachers should not try to teach both versions of all twenty-six letters at the same time.  To try simultaneously to teach two visually distinct forms with identical responses amid fifty other confusable forms with confusable sounds and labels [letter names] will almost guarantee learning difficulties."