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We’ve just launched a new resource tool: an online do-it-yourself worksheet creation tool for joined letters. As far as we know, it is the first of it’s kind — and it’s free! You can use it to extend the life of your Getty-Dubay Italic book to suit your needs. Teachers and students can create PDF worksheets for both basic italic and cursive italic practice. Use it for informal acceleration, to support other curricula (e.g., via vocabulary lists, definitions, poetry, etc.), and to personalize your handwriting practice.

Type in your text. “A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” becomes…

a basic italic practice model

or a cursive italic practice model.

How is this different from the Blackline Masters CD-ROM? The Blackline Masters CD-ROM provides hundreds of additional practice sheets that target specific letters or joins. Each instruction page in the Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Series Books A – G has additional practice sheets on the Blackline Masters CD-ROM that provide writing cues such as stroke sequence and starting point. With the DIY Worksheets, you get to choose your own text, but stroke sequence and starting point are not displayed. To use a musical analogy, the Blackline Masters CD-ROM is your scale book and the DIY Worksheets can be your etudes.

Here’s how it works:

(1) Go to our teacher resource page to register and login in using your Getty-Dubay Italic book UPC. If you don’t own a Getty-Dubay Italic book, no problem — you can sign up for a free trial.

(2) Select the size of the writing you want to practice: 9mm lines for larger letters (as in the Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Series Books B and C), or 5mm lines for smaller writing (as in Books D through G and Write Now). 

(3) Enter the text you want to see on each line of your worksheet.  Each line you type will show up on your worksheet with a practice line after it. (In other words, your text entries are on odd-numbered lines). Under each text box, select if you want that text to appear as basic italic or cursive italic.

(4) When you’re done entering the text, click “Submit” at the bottom of the entry page. In a few moments, your practice sheet will appear in the same window. Just print it out or download as you would any other web PDF.

The joins represented on the cursive italic DIY Worksheet are the standard Getty-Dubay Italic joins. But there are options! On the blank lines of the worksheet, please practice any of the numerous cursive italic join options that you prefer. (See your Getty-Dubay Italic book for details).

Tips: If you didn’t get the result you wanted, use your web browser’s “back” button to make changes to your text and try again. If you want to produce many copies of a single DIY Worksheet for a classroom, print out the master copy and make duplicates from that (the watermark will fade away).

Now you can bring Getty-Dubay Italic into your classroom for every subject. Perhaps you want your students to learn a vocabulary list, memorize a poem, practice writing homonyms or synonyms. Previously only available for our new book, Getty-Dubay Italic Calligraphy, now the Italic Handwriting Series has DIY worksheets. Just enter the text you want to practice in our online tool and then print the PDF it generates — it’s that simple, and it’s free! Visit the DIY Worksheets and Videos page to get started.