Handwriting Question

[Element]

I've been lurking about these forums for several months and I have learned so much from all of you! I'm preparing to homeschool my son in the fall and I feel pretty confident about some of my choices, less confident about others. Right now I'm having a hard time choosing a handwriting curriculum. I ordered the GD Italic teacher's manual and two of the workbooks, but now that I look at them I just don't love the style as much as I thought I would.

 

My question is basically this: Can I just teach him my own handwriting style? I'm so new to this, I'm still in the "I don't want to ruin my kid by straying from pre-printed curriculum!" phase. ;) Honestly, though, my mom was a professional calligrapher before becoming a public school teacher, and my handwriting is kind of a combination of the Italic she taught me and the D'Nealian I learned in school.

 

Also, I should mention that he already knows lower case D'N pretty well. I know, the easy thing to do would be to stick with D'N through the upper case, but some of those letters are just... kind of ugly IM(very)HO!

[desertmum]

Many homeschoolers do their own handwriting curriculum. Personally I can't do this, but only because my own handwriting is terrible. BUT if your handwriting is consistent enough you can trace the letters and have the page laminated (or you could be cheeky and ask your calligrapher mum to do this for you). Your child can then use whiteboard markers to go over the letters.

 

 

You can also buy software like Startwrite or Educational Fontaware which show letter formation with arrows and dots and go from them (this is what I'm doing).

[nansk]

Can I just teach him my own handwriting style?

 

Sure you can! And you don't need our permission to do it! :-)

Until I found Getty-Dubay Italics (and liked it very much) I had set out to teach my dd the style of cursive that I learnt in school.

 

BTW just so you know, there are a few other Italic styles out there. One of them may appeal to you.

[raceNzanesmom]

Also, even when you use a book you can add your own style, esp if it's just a few letters. As kids learn the mechanics they'll add their own style too.

[veggiegal]

As long as your own style is comprehensible to others (you're not secretly a doctor, are you? :tongue_smilie:) I say go for it. Handwriting is a means of communicating, and if he will be able to do that learning to write from you, as well as able to read cursive himself, no problems whatsoever. Have fun!

[Element]

Thank you all so much for the advice! I feel a lot more confident now about just doing it my own way. Also, I didn't know there were different styles of Italic, so I appreciated the links.

[Endorphins]

Absolutely! For printing, I just downloaded my favorite free dotted font (D'Nealian "Precursive") and have the boys trace my favorite quotes and Bible verses. I'm a big fan of tracing as we've been highly successful with improvements using it, so if I were going to do my own handwriting, I'd probably use a super hard pencil (maybe a 9H so my writing was very light) and write a few lines to trace with a regular (2H) pencil. There are also font makers out there that allow you to input your own handwriting, if you're concerned with consistency or just want to use a word processor. Otherwise, if you just want to write them an example, your job is easy peasy (I tend to make things too hard, as you can probably tell LOL).