News

New Online Letter Tracing Game

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Announcing the NEW Handwriting Success™ Letter Tracing Web App!

If you’ve been using our DIY Worksheet Creator or any of our other Special Content, you will be pleased to know that we’ve installed a new tool for elementary-age students 7 and up.

Now your students can play the Italic Letter Tracing Game!

Develops these skills: 

  • Recognition of lowercase letter families based on similar shapes, 
  • Motor memory of correct letter paths, 
  • Knowledge of starting points, stroke sequence and stroke direction, 
  • Fluency of letter formation.

Uses a progression of scaffolds:

  • Following – watch the prompt trace the letter path
  • Leading – move the prompt along the letter path
  • Leading + drawing – move the prompt and draw along the letter path
  • Free drawing – draw the letter path without a guide

Have fun!

The Cursive Quiz

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What does “cursive” mean, anyway? Here’s a way to find out.

Take the five-question quiz to test your knowledge of what it means to handwrite in cursive — just for fun! The Cursive Quiz covers the history of cursive, recognizing cursive, the law, current cursive educational styles and their pedagogical sequence. Enjoy (and good luck)!

Take the Cursive Quiz here.

Handwriting Lesson Plans?

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Yes! With HomeschoolPlanet®

Fitting handwriting instruction into your student’s day is so important. But you’ve got a lot on your plate, right? So why not make it easy with the official Getty-Dubay® Italic Handwriting Series Lesson Plans from HomeschoolPlanet®?

HomschoolPlanet® offers everything homeschool parents need, when they need it, all in one place!

  • Keep Home, School, and Work schedules in one place
  • Automatically reschedule assignments
  • Seamlessly integrate lesson plans from popular homeschool curriculum companies
  • Customizable grading, attendance, transcripts, and more

The official Getty-Dubay® Italic Handwriting Series Lesson Plans give you the recommended day-by-day educational sequence with specific page and line numbers, plus separate parent and student notes for each lesson. You can get the individual workbook lesson plans, or the bundle of all seven lessons plans for Books A-G. With a few clicks it will be integrated into your online HomeschoolPlanet® calendar, to view from anywhere and share with your students.

Separate lesson plans are available for the Getty-Dubay® Italic Handwriting Series App Edition.

Please note: The Lesson Plans are an optional supplement and do not contain curriculum content.

See HomeschoolPlanet® for more information and pricing.

Free cursive worksheets

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Make cursive worksheets for your students with ease.

Welcome to our new DIY Worksheet Creator. We’ve been busy adding features to make it even easier to bring legibility and ease to your handwriting instruction:

  • What-you-see-is-what-you-get editing.
  • Your choice of solid or dashed-arrows styles.
  • Choice of colors.
  • Formatting options.
  • Mix and match styles and colors on each line.
  • Contrasting ruled lines.
  • Supports dozens of languages.
  • Special characters allowed — anything you can type will print!
  • No watermark for registered users.

You asked for it, and we delivered! For even more flexibility, use the Getty-Dubay® downloadable computer Fonts — they join as you type! Try it…

Earth Day 2022

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Handwriting Success, LLC is proud to support 1% For The Planet as a Carbonfree® Small Business Partner.

Handwriting Success has a strong environmental commitment, and invests in making its products more sustainable, including using wind-powered printing, soy-based inks and recycled paper content in the production of books, solar-powered warehousing, as well as digital content delivery and print-on-demand to reduce paper use and shipping.

Owner Jonathan Dubay says, “At Handwriting Success we take to heart the Chief Seattle quotation that is in our handwriting book for 10-year-old students: ‘All things are connected.’ To us, that means education and environmental stewardship go hand-in-hand. We want to make certain that we are preparing the best future in every way possible for the next generations.”

The 500th anniversary year!

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The first handwriting instruction book made its debut 500 years ago.

Cover page of Arrighi’s La Operina, 1522. Source: Library of Congress.

Vatican scribes of the Italic Renaissance had invented a legible, versatile and beautiful hand based on the proportions of the golden rectangle and ancient Roman capital letters. The cancellerescha style of writing, now known as Italic, spread rapidly and became the model for new styles of type as well. It was the handwriting style of Michelangelo, Queen Elizabeth I, and countless others since. We assume that the popularity of this style was what inspired Ludovico Vincentino Arrighi in 1522 to publish his La Operina, a book of handwriting models in the new chancery style to be used for copywork.

This renaissance Italic became the progenitor for the handwriting styles —and styles of type — that we use today across the globe wherever the Latin-based alphabet is written.

Italic is the basis for many type styles today.

Handwriting instruction by copying and tracing has been around for thousands of years. Students in ancient times used tablets of clay or wax, marking the surface with a stylus and then smoothing it over to write again.

One telling example of this is from a letter dating from the 7th century BCE, where the King of Assyria scolds his daughter-in-law for not doing her homework, literally saying, “Why are you not tablet-writing?” 

Here is a much later example of student tablet writing from 2nd Century Egypt (written in Greek).

2nd Century wax tablet that contains teacher (top) and student writing (bottom). Source: The British Library.

But Arrighi’s book presented two new ideas: Standardized instruction and literacy for the general population.

Today, we have a different sort of tablet and stylus, and no shortage of handwriting methods. And yet, literacy levels in schools across the US have remained stagnant and low, and there is an uneven distribution of handwriting instruction. New research suggests that handwriting is an integral part of the science of reading, literacy and college readiness. In other words, we write to learn.

At Handwriting Success, we’re connecting the dots with Getty-Dubay Italic handwriting that brings the spirit of Arrighi, and his handwriting, into the 21st century. Not only has the Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Series for K-6 been helping provide legible, practical handwriting to hundreds of thousands of students for over 40 years, it is now available for tablet and stylus. Our Handwriting Success App provides stand-alone year-long handwriting curricula in seven ebooks that students can write in.

So, are you tablet-writing?