Hi Callie.
I started with Cursive First (and added Pencil Pete) – then we switched to Peterson Directed. I like how Peterson Directed works to get the letters into your muscle memory, and that for cursive, 18 (I think) of the 26 lower case letters are made with 4 basic strokes, and the few others have jsut slight variations of the strokes. And with their cursive, there is a “print” (ie, unjoined letters) that they can use while they are still getting used to writing that is otherwise identical to the joined cursive. (this is different from the manuscript print option).
Cursive First was fairly good too, but went the tracing route to start, and we jsut weren’t getting the results I wanted. I know there are others on here that like it. Oh, and Cursive First was designed to go with their Spelling to Write and Read, so I think the letters are done in the order of their reading program instead of what is easiest. Cursive first uses the clock face to describe how to make letters, so your child should be familiar with where the numbers are on an analog clock.
Hope this helps!
