Looking for a Handwriting Without Tears alternative?
People arrive at this question for four quite different reasons, and the right answer depends entirely on which one is yours. Here is an honest read on where Handwriting Without Tears is still the best choice, and where something else fits better.
We make a handwriting app, so we are not a neutral party. What follows is written to be accurate rather than flattering to us: HWT is a well-designed programme with a genuine evidence base, and for several of the reasons people go looking for an alternative, the honest answer is that it is already the right tool.
What Handwriting Without Tears actually is
An American handwriting curriculum developed by an occupational therapist. Its defining choices are a vertical manuscript print with simplified letterforms and minimal loops, a strong emphasis on developmental readiness before pencil work, and multisensory materials — wooden pieces, slates, songs — used before children write at all. Cursive arrives later, around second or third grade, and is likewise more upright and less looped than traditional American cursive.
Those choices are deliberate and well reasoned. Simplified vertical letters reduce b/d reversals and are easier for a hand with limited fine motor control. The readiness-first sequencing is straight out of occupational therapy practice. It is a genuinely thoughtful programme, which is why it is so widely used in US schools and in OT clinics.
Why people look for an alternative
1. “We're in the UK and this doesn't match school”
The most common reason, and the most clear-cut. HWT teaches vertical print first; English primaries overwhelmingly teach a lead-in style heading for continuous cursive, with joins from Year 2. A UK child using HWT at home is practising a different destination from the one school is taking them to.
Then look for: anything built to the English curriculum and to your school's scheme.
2. “It's a lot of programme for one child”
HWT is a classroom curriculum with workbooks, manipulatives and teacher materials. For one child at a kitchen table, that can be more structure and more cost than the situation calls for.
Then look for: something lighter you can do in five minutes a day without a lesson plan.
3. “I can't tell if it's working”
Paper shows you the result and hides the process. If a child forms a letter bottom-up, the finished page can look fine, and you will not know until speed or joining exposes it.
Then look for: something that watches the pen while it moves rather than marking the page afterwards.
4. “My child finds it boring”
Worth being honest with yourself about. If a child is refusing to practise at all, the programme is not the problem to solve first — the refusal is.
Then look for: anything short, daily and cheerful. The best programme is the one that actually happens.
The style difference, drawn
This is the crux of it for UK families. Same word, two destinations.
Upright, simple, minimal loops. Designed to reduce reversals and to be achievable for a hand that is still developing.
Every letter starts on the line and joins to the next. A different destination, reached a different way.
When HWT is still the right answer
We would genuinely rather you used the right thing than our thing.
- Your child has significant fine motor difficulties. The vertical simplified letterforms and the readiness-first sequence exist precisely for this, and the OT grounding is real.
- Your child's US school already uses it. Consistency between school and home beats any theoretical improvement.
- Your child is not ready to hold a pencil. HWT's pre-writing work is better than anything a screen can do. So is a tray of sand.
- You want a physical, screen-free programme. A perfectly reasonable thing to want, and we are the wrong answer to it.
Where Penwick is different
Not better across the board — different, in three specific ways.
It reads the strokes
Penwick scores how a letter was formed — where the pen went down, which way it travelled, whether it lifted — not how the finished shape looks. That is the thing paper cannot tell you.
It is built to UK schemes
Continuous cursive and precursive, with the style set to match your school, and letterforms recorded by a practising primary teacher rather than derived from a font.
It is five minutes, not a lesson
Short daily sessions with the reward loop children actually turn up for. No lesson plan, no printing, no marking.
Penwick is not an occupational therapy programme, is not a whole-class curriculum, and has no physical materials. It assumes a child who can hold a stylus or use a finger on a tablet. If that is not where your child is yet, start somewhere else and come back.
Handwriting Without Tears is a registered trademark of Learning Without Tears. Penwick is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to them in any way, and this comparison reflects our own reading of publicly available information about their programme.
Which of the four reasons brought you here?
The story behind Penwick A teacher, her brother, and a boy who hated writing Read it →