Teaching Handwriting to Young Children: An Open Educational Resource for Teachers and Parents

Abstract

Good handwriting plays a key role in children’s writing efforts and in turn their academic achievement. Teachers identify the need for good learning resources in their ability to provide handwriting instruction to young learners. This article describes the design and development of a learning resource, Teaching Handwriting to Young Children: A resource for teachers and parents, a collaborative effort between the author and volunteers from the Bow Valley Calligraphy Guild. They are provided as an Open Educational Resource (OER) through Creative Commons Licensing and available free of charge on our institutionally supported PRISM platform, thus ensuring accessibility and affording dissemination of the resource for intended users. These include early childhood educators (ECE) who work with increasing diversity in today’s classrooms, faculty who work in initial teacher preparation (ITP) programs, and parents who homeschool their young children.