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Handwriting
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I’m looking for some Handwriting Lesson suggestions. My kids are 9, 7, and 4. My 9 and 7 year old both have terrible handwriting. My 4 year old isn’t really writing yet. What would you all recommend I use, especially with my older two, to help them with neater handwriting practices?
For cursive, we like
- Print to Cursive Proverbs–which is a slower-paced program, containing both cursive & manuscript practice
- Cheerful Cursive–my favorite cursive book, which is very comprehensive and focuses only on cursive
- I Can Write Cursive–a great follow-up cursive program for DC who can form the cursive letters, but need more practice with cursive “fluency”.
For manuscript, I prefer just using phonics workbooks (like ETC books A through C), since they generally have a nice amount of writing…so many handwriting programs have them fill out an entire page of each letter in a single lesson. 🙁 Barbara Getty’s Italic book A is nice as well. After they learn to form their letters, we switch to copywork programs like SCM or I print my own pages on the Zaner Bloser website.
My favorite teaching tips are to keep a close eye on how they form the letters. It’s so much easier to correct mistakes when they first start, then when they’ve been writing for longer. Secondly, I like to set a timer for shorter, more concentrated lessons. We get out our materials, then set the timer for 5 minutes. They can get a lot accomplished in that time, without resorting to sloppy work.
Hello Afthfuljrney. Ditto Holly’s paragraph on favorite teaching tips. These are short lessons of their best work. SCM offers an award-winning handwriting series which is found in the Language Arts section of their bookstore. We’ve used both “Delightful Handwriting” and then “Print to Cursive” with success. If you click on either and scroll down you can see where they fit in the SCM series.
Thank you both for your responses!
My oldest can print ok, but her cursive definitely needs a lot of work. My 7 year old, well, it’s just a mess! 🙂 I’m wanting to change that before it gets out of hand.
With both of my older children, I really didn’t have them do any kind of handwriting practice until they were 5/6 years old. Did I wait too long? Should I start with some sort of practice for my 4 year old, or is she still too young?
I know this sounds silly, maybe, but it had me concerned recently when my children started writing letters to pen pals and they receive these letters that are actually legible compared to the letters they sent that look like chicken scratch! Yikes! Thanks again! I’ll definitely be looking into your recommendations!
You didn’t wait too long. I’ve taught quite a few kids (from different families) at a homeschool co-op. There is a huge range of abilities at those ages. Some have beautiful handwriting and others have handwriting only a doctor would be proud of. 😉
My 2nd child is a lefty and a boy, both factors that many believe lead to more difficulty with handwriting. I didn’t see much improvement with writing until about 10 yo. Short, consistent copywork helped greatly with this, and I started noticing lots of improvement when I made copywork a priority. His handwriting isn’t beautiful by any means, but it’s legible and he writes much faster than he used to. Overall I’m thrilled with how far he’s come!
Is Print to Cursive quite comprehensive? Does it have a lot of stroke practice and does it group letters by strokes? Thanks.
The lessons start with a Proverb verse in manuscript. My DC spend a lesson or two copying it. Then the next lesson teaches a cursive letter, having them copy that letter a few times, then “filling in” a cursive word with the letter they just learned to see how it connects with other letters. As the lessons go, they move to writing complete words in cursive. The last several lessons introduce the capital letters.
It does not teach individual strokes, but I think they letters are arranged so you have similar ones together (for example it starts with i, t, then u).
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