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Teaching Cursive ? Please Help!
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I have a 3rd grade/just turned 9 yr old son who is ‘learning’ cursive. He doesn’t mind to write in cursive at all, but does not make his letter connections properly, or slant properly.
We have tried Rod & Staff Cursive for 3rd grade, and it was utterly ridiculous in how much time and how precise they wanted the SUBJECT of Cursive to be. I’ve tried teaching him myself with how I form the letters, and that’s where the ‘connection & slant’ problems come in. WE’ve tried 2 different free online sources. And I still feel we are lost in the sauce.
How serious should we be taking cursive as a subject and how long should it take him to learn it properly and use it properly? What curriculum did you find that worked? OR…will all this just come with daily copywork?
I like Peterson Directed Handwriting…. It teaches the muscle memory by saying the strokes as you make them and NOT tracing.
Some people don’t think cursive is important, and some school divisions are not teaching it anymore. However, I think that people that can’t do cursive are at a disadvantage.
I read about a study made of one of the big tests with an essay component… I think it was the SAT or ACT… only 15% of the students wrote the essay in cursive. But that 15% scored higher in the SAT (or whatever test it was) overall than the other 85%. (Sorry I don’t remember the details.)
I have successfully used Cursive First, an inexpensive reproducible program with one child and Pencil Pete, an inexpensive software program with another. CF says the strokes as you make them. PP repeats it over and over for the child to see. I used the “wording” from CF with PP and intend to do that with my next two kiddos.
We teach cursive from the beginning now.
hmmm, with the ‘headache’ surrounding this issue for us…I’m wondering…should I go ahead and teach my 1st grader cursive now with my 3rd grader?
And, I have a 4.5 yr old learning his letters now. Would you really teach him to write them in cursive first and not print them?
Goodness. I thought after 3.5 years, I was finally getting this homeschool thing down. NOT!
We recently started using New American Cursive from Memoria Press (https://www.memoriapress.com/descriptions/new-cursive.html) and my kids are enjoying it! Right now I have my 111 1/2 year old son and 6 year old daughter using it and it is surprisingly going well! Easy, not flamboyant…. my son has sensory issues and I didn’t think he’d write in cursive, but he is.
I taught dd10 to print at age 4 b/c she was ready and that’s what I thought I should do. At 6 she wanted cursive and when I taught her using CF, she said, “Mama, this is so much easier. Why didn’t we start with this?” That got me to researching and I discovered until the 40s or 50s, all kids started w/ cursive in the first grade. So, w/ ds7, I started teaching him w/ cursive at age 5 or 6. He has lovely penmanship and still picked up printing on his own. Now dd4 is ready to write. In fact, she taught herself all capital letters on her own somehow. We will be beginning cursive, slowly, next week. IMO, it is much easier to just start with cursive. Go slowly and you’ll soon see progress, I’m sure.
We use Christian Liberty Press writing workbooks. My 2nd grader is learning it. We focus on one letter per week and include some short words. He did learn manuscript first and I show him how similar the cursive letter is to the printed letter and how cursive makes it all run together without lifting the pencil off the page. I also have him move his book slanted so his letters are more slanted while pointing that out to him. I will then make my own cursive copywork using a link someone on here shared earlier.
http://www.handwritingworksheets.com/flash/cursive/paragraph/index.html
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