By Samantha Swindler / Managing Editor

In a Corbin Primary classroom, preschool and kindergarten teachers are sitting at miniature desks, each coloring a picture of a crow.

This is teacher training. And don’t worry, there’s a point.

“When you guys colored in the crow, how many of you colored it completely with vertical, up and down lines?” instructor Todd Misura asks the class. “How many of you colored it with horizontal strokes? How many of you guys used a lot of diagonals? Remember one of those things I talked about a while ago? Diagonals are the last thing to develop.”

So by providing children with pictures positioned diagonally, teachers can influence the strokes kids use — and mastering a diagonal stroke is actually an important skill for a preschooler to develop before he tackles letter formation in kindergarten.

“Coloring isn’t busywork if you don’t make it busywork,” Misura told the teachers on Tuesday. “If it meets an educational goal, it’s not busywork. For some of our children who are in this acquisition of the different strokes and they are really struggling with it, then obviously it’s an educational tool, and you can use that.”

Misura works for the company that created Handwriting Without Tears, a curriculum designed to help children learn to write. He gives roughly 30 such presentations to teachers every year, showing instructors how to use the program’s wooden blocks, hand-held chalkboards, songs, puppets and workbooks to teach proper letter formation.

“Here we’re teaching kids to use multi-sensory techniques to build letters as opposed to that drill and practice model that we all learned,” he said. “They don’t have the time in the schools to do that anymore. We’re trying to teach them, using developmental principles, the easiest way that the kids master this as quickly as possible.”

The Handwriting Without Tears program was developed by an occupational therapist whose own son was struggling with handwriting in the first grade.

“Last year, more than 2 million kids across the country were using Handwriting Without Tears,” Misura said.

This will be the first year that Corbin Primary and Elementary teachers will be using the program to help teach capital, lowercase and cursive letters.

“He taught us some little tricks to correct some of the mistakes they were having before, like holding the grip of the pencil — that was the biggest thing that helped me,” said kindergarten teacher Rhonda Watson. “Plus, the little stories that he told to make the letters, it brings it to the child so they can understand it.”

Stories such as the tale of lowercase “g” named George — George is the first lowercase letter in the alphabet whose tail dips low, and he’s afraid he’ll fall. His tail needs to curve under him to catch him just in case.

That story, Misura said, helps kids remember to curve to the left instead of the right, a common mistake that leaves children inadvertently creating a “q.”

Sometimes the best way to teach a child is to view class from their perspective.

So, during their training, the teachers also sang and danced to alphabet-themed songs, and followed the instructions of a puppet at the front of the classroom.

Handwriting Without Tears starts with only capital letters and teaches the four strokes used to create them — big line, little line, big curve, and little curve.

Children learn capital letters in three groups: the “frog jump capitals” (F, E, D, P, B, R, N and M); “starting corner capitals” (H, K, L, U, V, W, X, Y and Z); and “center starters” (C, O, Q, G, S, A, I, T and J.) Emphasis is placed on the construction of each letter. Frog jump capitals, for example, start with a line at the top, go to the bottom, and “frog jump” back to the top to complete the letter.

The program breaks down letter formation to the simplest terms, and for many teachers, it’s the first time they’ve had such detailed training on the subject.

“You’re not taught as a teacher how to teach grip, how to teach handwriting,” Misura said. “Most schools don’t have anything on how to teach handwriting, so teachers are just doing the best they can and this training seminar is usually the only training that they’ve had in how to teach handwriting and all these fine motor skills.”

The curriculum only calls for 10-15 minutes a day devoted to handwriting, but educators say it can make a big difference for students.

“Unfortunately what happens with some of our kids is they hate to write, because it doesn’t look good and they can’t do it very well and very effectively, so they avoid it,” Misura said. “And the kids who are practicing get better, and the kids who languish... are just kids who can’t get it done. But I think everyone can, with good instruction.”