St. Anthony music teacher Kepa Stern, left, holds a recognition certificate for the school and its handwriting winner, Apollina Recupero, center, with her teacher, Shawna-Lei Smith. (HCH photo | Anna Weaver)
By Anna Weaver
Hawaii Catholic Herald
A fourth grader at St. Anthony School in Kailua has some of the best handwriting in the country.
That’s according to the Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest. Apollina Recupero made it past several other levels of competition to be judged the best fourth grade entrant across the country and that grade-level’s Grand National Champion.
Recupero won $500 as well as a certificate and trophy, and St. Anthony received a $1,000 Zaner-Bloser product voucher and certificate.
As part of her entry, Recupero had to write her name, the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” which has every letter of the alphabet in it, and share what she loves about handwriting.
“What I like best about handwriting is how cursive looks,” Recupero wrote. “The way it curves and flows across the page.”
The contest judges picked winners based on letter shape, size, spacing and slant.
Apollonia Recupero’s winning handwriting submission
St. Anthony reports that while they have had district winners in the Zaner-Bloser competition in the past, this is the first time one of the Windward Oahu school’s students has won at the national level.
St. Anthony was also the only school in Hawaii to win a state award.
The Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest is open to all students in kindergarten through eighth grade, with kindergarten to second graders submitting manuscript or print entries and grades three and up sending in cursive entries. The contest receives about 75-80,000 entries a year.
The Zaner-Bloser company is a publisher of handwriting and other educational materials.
