D’Nealian Handwriting (2024)

A streamlined approach — Teach, Model and Guide Practice, Practice, and Evaluate — teaches handwriting in a way that is easy to implement in any classroom.

In each lesson, skills are modeled through a variety of learning modalities, including audio, visual, tactile, and kinesthetic.

References for Stroke Modeling Animation Videos and printable practice pages, strategies for supporting English language learners, and more are all provided right at point of use.

Explicit teaching support is provided for each tracing or writing skill — and is available in both English and Spanish!

At the end of each lesson, the Activity Bank provides support for all learning modalities. Additional activities provide enrichment, letter practice, and creative projects.

Students begin by learning the skills they need to prepare them to write, including proper writing sitting position, understanding left-to-right progression, and tracing and drawing lines.

Students learn lowercase and capital letters by tracing the letters, then writing them. Students also learn to write numbers and number words.

D’Nealian Handwriting teaches children proper letter size, slant, and spacing.

The continuous stroke method facilitates a smooth transition to writing lowercase cursive letters. Students learn capital cursive letters by tracing and then writing them.

The Student Edition provides pages for practice, review, and evaluation, giving students ample opportunities to practice forming letters and words, reinforce their learning, and self-evaluate their work. Additional practice pages can be downloaded and printed as needed.

Support early elementary students with hands-on tactile and kinesthetic learning using Alpha Touch Cards, a classroom set of 25 Write-On/Wipe-Off Cards, and Tracing Letter and Number Cards.

Students practice their writing with real-world writing tasks such as writing addresses, letters, recipes, thank-you notes, and more. Especially as students transition to cursive handwriting, these real-world writing tasks help them understand the importance of learning how to read and write cursive.

Every lesson includes an Activity Bank that offers opportunities to differentiate and extend instruction. Additional practice activities for a variety of learning modalities (e.g., visual, auditory, kinesthetic) are included.

Add a personal touch to handwriting practice with the Practice Generator! Teachers can use pre-built templates to make custom handwriting practice pages featuring students’ names, communities, favorite hobbies, sports, and more.

Provide audio-visual support with animation videos that model proper size, slant, and spacing for numbers and all manuscript and cursive lowercase and uppercase letters.

Practice in 3 easy steps! Students watch a stroke modeling video and complete a tracing activity. They finish their interactive practice with free form letter formation.

Teachers can easily print pages from a printable PDF of the Student Edition, or give students even more practice with pages from the Practice and Review Workbook.

The new Savvas Practice Generator lets teachers quickly create customized practice worksheets for individual learner needs from pre-built templates. Customized practice increases student ownership of learning!

The continuous stroke method in D’Nealian Handwriting supports students with unique learning needs such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, or fine motor delays.

Using a continuous stroke helps students better learn and retain common spelling patterns.

The D’Nealian method also lets students refine and correct their handwriting as they go, making both manuscript and cursive easier to learn.