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printing stuggles
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This is our first year homeschooling our two boys, 10 & 7. One area they both struggle with is printing. PS has allowed too many bad habits in terms of letter formation. Our younger ds had regressed in his legibility and neatness through the year. Our older ds has been going to an occupational therapist, so there had been some improvement in neatness and legibility, but even she doesn’t stress forming the letters in the correct way as long as they are neat and legible. Written work is a huge issue with this ds: he hates it. He is very articulate, but getting anything on paper is very difficult for him. I really hate the idea of starting printing from scratch with him, but it may be easier to learn cursive for him is he can print the letters the correct way. At PS he was not encouraged to attempt any cursive this past year (4th grade.) as he really didn’t have any success with it in 3rd grade and they wanted him to concentrate on improving his printing. Two friends of our who HS have been using, or are about to use, Danby(?) Italic, which seems to make a very smooth transition from manuscript to cursive. Do you think it would it be worth the frustration of starting over and relearning (nearly) every letter?
Everyone is probably going to offer you different answers here, so I’ll share my thoughts.
First, if you want to start over with handwriting one curriculum my family has loved using is Peterson Directed Handwriting. The reason is they focus first on large muscle memory, then small muscle memory – all combined with verbalizing the strokes for a letter. Basically you learn letter strokes for print or cursive and each letter has a chant with the child saying each stroke they do as they write the letter. As it becomes muscle memory they speed up and drop the talking part. You begin with air writing very big and then smaller and smaller, then can progress to a large dry erase board, unlined paper, lined paper, etc. You go at the speed the child is ready for, so my little ones just do the air writing and dry erase board for a long time as fun, while my older children were quickly ready to move to paper, but joined in the air writing for at least a few days with each new letter. You can start with print or go directly to cursive.
Second, if he’s having trouble getting words on paper he’s not unusual! Continue to require some copywork to work on letter formation, but then let him try typing to see if that works better for getting thoughts on paper. If he’s narrating well then don’t make a huge issue of it all, find ways to make the writing process easier until his body has time to develop the fine motor stamina to write without having to think about every letter (interrupting the flow of thoughts he wants to put on paper).
I agree with Tristan… we are also using Peterson Directed Handwriting. We are just doing the cursive. My kids are younger (7 and less) and still struggle to write when they aren’t copying at this point… but my 7yo is writing fairly nicely.
If you do their cursive… you can start with a cursive “print” – by not Joining the letters. (you don’t have any end tails on the letters at all…. and they will naturally join the letters as they start getting faster/better at it.
I am a HUGE fan of the Modern Manuscript & Modern Cursive fonts. Modern Manuscript can also be referred to as D’Nealean. It is a curvy print that makes the cursive transition very simple. My children have and do enjoy it. I am also a firm believer in tracks or shadow usage. meaning the printing practice is traced in a shadow or outline of a letter than a dotted line. I LOVE that you can use the shadow option on the Startwrite software and vary it’s degree of hue. Carson-Delosa Publishing ( look at their Comprehensive Handwriting Practice in Modern Manuscript), Evan Moore, Startwrite software, …. Classically Cursive series put out by Veritas Press is awesome. Great for starting the cursive with older children. You can see alot of the samples on christianbook.com too. Anyways, my 2 cents! I am sure you will find something that works for you as there are some great minds that hang out here! I learn so much reading these threads.
PS: I just did a search on currclick.com using the term Modern Manuscript and it came up with quite a few book samples. This one in particular is very beautiful and based on the McGiffey readers & KJV bible:
http://www.currclick.com/product_info.php?products_id=37167&it=1
Will have to go back and browse their other offerings…hmmm….
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