Beautiful Handwriting!: Printing Workbook

This workbook offers fun and practical exercises to help children develop great penmanship skills. It includes practice for lowercase and uppercase letters, words, and sentences, along with a fun activity at the end of each lesson. The exercises are based on positive words and sentences to promote self-esteem and happiness. Get Beautiful Handwriting now at a low price to give your child the tools they need for success.

Beautiful Handwriting! has excellent promise as an educational and socio-emotional tool for elementary aged students. The workbook goes beyond the standard rote rehearsal methods of most handwriting workbooks with attempts to not simply boost students' fine motor skills through correct penmanship, but also aims to enhance educational self-efficacy, induce positive emotional states, and encourage the parent-child dynamic during the process. Thus, this work has great potential to provide a unique and beneficial angle to this particular genre.

Past empirical studies have demonstrated that positive wording may impact learning and word recognition. Specifically, positive words are recognized more quickly than words with negative emotional connotations (Kuperman, Estes, Brysbaert, & Warriner, 2014), and new vocabulary is learned more efficiently for positive words than words with a negative or neutral tone when presented via repetition (Hu, Liu, & Zhang, 2010). In addition, research has provided evidence that inducing a positive mood may improve goal setting behaviors and later performance in young children (Hom & Arbuckle, 1988), and that in certain cognitive tasks, both task accuracy and efficiency are increased by priming elementary students to have a positive mood (Rader & Hughes, 2005). Pulling from these research findings, the positive approach and techniques used within Beautiful Handwriting! may very well have distinct cognitive and academic benefits beyond improved lettering skills.

Shannon Lance, M.A.
Adjunct Psychology Faculty