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At the beginning of the year, BIS adopted a new handwriting program. This program is based upon Getty-Dubay, a program that has been around for 40 years. Students in grades KG-5 are learning both manuscript printing and cursive.
To learn more, we asked Mr. Brian Wallace, Grade 2 teacher, for his insights and experiences into the program:
BIS has been explicitly teaching handwriting to students in the elementary school. The program has been going for about 4 months now and after this short time, students in grade 2 are now using cursive for most of their writing. Such an amazing achievement with only 10 minutes of explicit teaching per day. As a teacher, I love the simplicity of the program and the trace-then-copy approach. Students listen and watch while teachers model on the board, then students complete the assigned activity in their workbook, while teachers observe and give feedback.
I love seeing how far my students have come in such a short time. I often compare how students are currently writing against how they wrote in their pretest, and the results are amazing. I think the best success story is from one of my beginner ELL students who was hardly writing at the start of the program, and who is now writing beautifully with fluent cursive. All of my students have shown considerable growth in their handwriting fluency. I am now encouraging my Word Wizards (phonics) group to use cursive as well. By the end of this school year, all BIS elementary students from Grade 2 to Grade 5 should be writing in cursive.
The program has a specific length for letters with ascenders (l, k, t, etc) and descenders (g, j, p, etc). I have made a template that helps students maintain correct sizing for their letters. With this template, students are now enjoying writing because they look at their published piece of work and feel a tremendous sense of success and pride in how neat their writing is. It melts my heart when I hear “Mr Wallace, can we use cursive?” Teaching writing is no longer a chore, and it’s now something my students look forward to each day.
