edWeb.net and Learning Without Tears have launched Crayons, Pencils, and Keyboards: Inspiring Learning in Your Elementary School Classroom, a free, professional learning community on edWeb. Through this online community, Learning Without Tears will bring together educators around the world and provide tips and tricks for making Pre-K-5 readiness, handwriting, and keyboarding fun and easy, and create confident communicators. Good handwriting is a crucial skill for student success. It develops the brain, enhancing neural activity and impacting the areas of the brain related to literacy. Students with good handwriting are also more likely to succeed in other subjects.

According to a recent survey of K-5 teachers, writing on paper happens during a major part of the elementary school day while technology lessons take place during 20 percent of instruction time. Handwriting plays a significant role in today’s elementary classrooms-including worksheet activities, journaling, taking notes and written exams-and it increases as students progress through the primary grades. Despite its importance in the school day, a majority of elementary education teachers do not receive formal training to teach handwriting.

Crayons, Pencils, and Keyboards: Inspiring Learning in Your Elementary School Classroom and its live, interactive edWebinars will provide support and strategies to help educators teach the critical skills of readiness, handwriting, and keyboarding. This new professional learning community offers an online forum for educators to collaborate with peers, share practices and tips, and access a growing professional learning center on trending education topics, fun and engaging activities, and easy-to-implement classroom resources.

The free edWebinars are a lively, real-time exchange of ideas with experts and colleagues. All edWebinars are recorded for on-demand viewing at any time. Educators earn a CE certificate for attending live or for taking a quiz after viewing the recording.

This program’s first edWebinar, “Top 10 Questions About Handwriting,” will take place on January 25th at 4pm Eastern Time. Denise Donica, DHSc, OTR/L, BCP, FAOTA; and Valerie Zaryczny, OTR/L, will explore why handwriting is still important, how multisensory instruction supports different learning styles, strategies that make handwriting fun and easy to teach and to learn, and how to select, use, and integrate technology and interactive media tools in intentional and developmentally appropriate ways. Educators are invited to register for the edWebinar on the event page.

“Learning Without Tears is excited to partner with edWeb to reach educators everywhere with creative classroom solutions, tips, and tools for kindergarten readiness instruction as well as handwriting and keyboarding instruction for transitional kindergarten through fifth grade. We’re thrilled to be a part of an online community that makes it simple for us to deliver our fun and engaging, multisensory strategies for Pre-K-5 educators so that they are positioned for success in their classrooms,” commented Jan Olsen, Learning Without Tears’ founder and president.

Lisa Schmucki, the founder of edWeb, commented, “We’re learning more and more about the importance of hands-on learning, and the connection between using our hands and our brains. So it’s wonderful to start this new program with Learning Without Tears on handwriting, keyboarding, and writing-foundational communication skills.”

Educators are invited to join the free Crayons, Pencils, and Keyboards: Inspiring Learning in Your Elementary School Classroom professional learning community on edWeb.net at www.edweb.net/cpk

Education organizations interested in supporting educators with free professional development around their area of expertise may contact [email protected] for details about edWeb sponsorship opportunities.

About Learning Without Tears
Learning Without Tears™ provides educators and families with kindergarten readiness, K-5 handwriting, and K-5 keyboarding materials, products, and training. We are a leading educational publishing company that provides easy to teach, easy to learn, and developmentally appropriate curricula for Pre-K-5. We make learning and teaching easy with fun, multisensory methods and superior products and training for kindergarten readiness, and K-5 handwriting and keyboarding.