So far I've been very pleased with the Penny Gardner Italics book, and my children's handwriting so far is looking a lot better. They are enjoying the little videos she has made, and so far I'm pleased.
However, I noticed right away a potential little problem, and it is coming close to the point that it will be a problem, as my son is almost done all the letters.
She is using Primary lines in a non-standard way... so imagine the standard primary lines, most people use the solid lines as the top and bottom of capital letters, with the dotted line in between being the top of the short small-case letters... ok, you have that pictured?
With her, for the letters, instead of 3 lines (solid, dotted, solid) you actually use 5 (dotted, solid, dotted, solid, dotted). Lower case letters (the small ones) fit in the main solid-dotted-solid. tall letters and Upper Case go up to the higher dotted line, and letters with descenders (y, j, g...) hang to the bottom dotted line. that middle dotted line is used to know when to start "branching" or curving a letter. Hopefully you can picture that - it is hard to put into words. It works great with lines that alternate solid/dotted all the way down the page, like I think most of the preprinted primary books are that you buy at places like Wal-mart. (Well, I think they do - I haven't bought any for years.)
So - the problem. Everything pretty much on the internet goes Solid-dotted-solid (space) Solid-dotted-solid..... so that messes up the system. I have one font that I can make lines like that - but how helpful is that?
Then the italic font I have that I'd like to use as a model - well, I can turn on lines for that (by making it italic... lol) but they are different again! Basically it uses 4 solid lines... 2 fairly close together, a bigger gap, then 2 fairly close together with the one being darker. So it makes sense (especially with the letters there)... you have the high line for the Capital/tall letters to reach, then the 2 middle lines are for the smaller lower case letters, and then the last thin line is for descenders. So I can see that being useful - but it isn't a standard line, so not sure how helpful it is except for doing copywork?
So how do I transition the kids?
They are taught with one type of lines...
Most of the notebooking pages, etc, use a similar but slightly different set of lines...
The copywork I could set them up with uses yet another set of lines...
and eventually they need to be able to work with standard lined paper...
and then when I want to show them how to change their italic print to italic joined (italic cursive) - they are back to the the first type again...
ACK!
Suggestions???
