Cursive on the wall. (command clips hold ALL THE THINGS)

I’m pretty sure I mentioned that we were going to work on cursive over the summer rather than waiting for the new school year? Oak Meadow Grade 3 jumps right in with copywork, and it felt like cursive was one of those skills that would work better for Ellie if we took a slower, more deliberate approach. I ordered two cursive workbooks (I needed to brush up on my cursive too) and a teacher’s manual from Handwriting Without Tears.

Things I Like and Why I Picked “Cursive Without Tears” (in case you Googled for a review):

• examples are clearly visible no matter what-handed the student is
• clean, straight-forward, easy-to-read script (room for personalized embellishment later)
• examples are straight up and down, allowing for a personal decision about the way to slant later
• if you use unlined writing paper (Waldorf style), you’ll be happy with the double lines to guide letter formation
• lesson progression makes sense
• because of the way letters are introduced, students practice real words early in the program

It was everything I’d hoped. We completed a lesson a day (mostly just on weekdays) and she was writing letters to Gran by the end of the summer.

Since we’re just beginning the writing assignments in Grade 3 and have just started to write on paper without guiding lines, I am still supporting her writing practice. I’ve had her dictate her sentences/paragraphs to me (at the end of last year, she was writing rough drafts on her own), I write them out in cursive, and she copies them over into her Main Lesson Book. This way, not only does she have a reference, she can see how the whole word/sentence looks compared to the whole. We’ll do this for another week or so in order to build a little confidence (and stamina) with unlined paper. Main Lesson Books can be intimidating when they are brand new and empty.

Ellie notes that when she was printing, her lines of handwriting tended to “go downhill” on the page. With cursive, the lines go uphill. This tickles us.

Have I talked about Main Lesson Books? If I haven’t, I’ll do that soon. It’s a neat idea.