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Immature penmanship in a 10.5 year old
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My 10 yr old dd still has very immature looking penmanship. She did copywork consistently throughout our last school year implementing the habit of best effort, and we saw improvement, but she still has a ways to go yet. She has been introduced to cursive, but I feel like she should perfect her printing before she goes to cursive full-time. Am I thinking about this correctly? How can I help her to improve her printing so it does not look so childish?
Robin
Now my children at this point are boys but non the less we also are still doing daily copywork, well because it looks so sloppy. I can’t get them to slow down and just do a good job. So I have them do it. I don’t think there is anything wrong with doing copy work. You can pick the amount or time and just have her keep trying. Use it as her written narration, or spelling/dication. But there are ways to keep doing it. Good luck Misty
Another thought on kids like this is an actual issue with writing. My 12 year old still has trouble writing. We were finally able to figure out that he has dysgraphia (kind of like a dyslexia of writing). It shows up with “sloppy” writing, trouble copying, letter reversals after 7 years old, trouble lining up math problems, poor spacing in writing.
If that sounds like what it could be, check http://www.diannecraft.com. She has a lot of info on how to help kids with various problems like this. We’ve been doing some of her stuff and it’s starting to help. We probably need to do more though.
I don’t think there is a particular need to perfect printing before starting cursive. My son prefers cursive over printing. I think he finds printing tedious and cursive is much easier for him. Thus, his cursive writing looks much better than his printing, and when he has to write, he does it in cursive.
We’ve been doing some of her stuff and it’s starting to help.
Have you been doing the “lazy 8” exercises? We started those but it has been hard to get my ds to continue doing them every day while I am at work. I have been forgetful in the evening having him do it during our read-aloud. I am not sure if he has true dysgraphia, but all of the signs are there that you mentioned. I wonder if attempting to teach Italic Cursive to him this fall will be too frustrating? I wonder if I can have him do both the “lazy 8’s” and some Italic – maybe using the “lazy 8’s” as kind of a warm-up? I just never know how much this will really help.
Hi Robin,
Without knowing all the particulars, I just wanted to echo Esby’s post. I wasn’t going to move my son into cursive until his printing looked better but when he found out his friend was writing with ‘running letters’ he wanted to learn to himself. His cursive looks a hundred times better than his manuscript and he seems to enjoy it much more.
Best,
Richele
Good food for thought. I think I will let her have her do more of her work in cursive this year and see if I am any happier with the results. I’m glad that she doesn’t have to perfect her printing first…at the rate we are going she’d never move on to cursive:-)!
One of my sons has autism, and he has struggled with the fine motor skills used in writing and copying. We tried everything to help him…the link above is what finally helped him make big strides. We are moving on to the cursive in a few weeks!
Melissa
I can’t speak to issues such as dysgraphia, but I am a firm believer in teaching cursive first and printing later.
DD9 learned to print at very young, but by 5 or 6, she was asking to learn cursive. I took 1 month to teach her and she said, “Mommy, this is SO much easier! Why didn’t we start with cursive?” Well, that got me to researching and I discovered that until recently (I believe it was the 50s.), cursive WAS taught first and those generations had lovely penmanship. We often learn best what we learn first, so I decided to teach our next child (ds6) beginning with cursive and he has lovely penmanship at only 6 years old. We are still learning the capital letters, but he can form all of the lowercase letters beautifully.
Two resources for cursive that I have used successfully – Cursive First & Pencil Pete.
Hope that helps,
Christie
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