Why teach cursive?

[OneStepAtATime]

Well see that is just it.  I have very pretty cursive.  Nobody cares!  LOL  I've never had to use it.  I write out the Christmas cards.  That's the one time in the year I even use it.

:)  Well, although I cannot see your cursive, even if noone else cares, I shall appreciate it from afar!  I actually vividly remember the beautiful cursive handwriting my 6th grade science teacher had.  Miss Nelson's handwriting was an art form.  I guess I just really like the look of cursive.  I have terrible cursive handwriting myself, though, so I guess it is cursive envy... :rolleyes:

[kbutton]

I think cursive is a huge boost to kids who struggle with handwriting automaticity and kids who pick up patterns easily. BUT, I think the benefits can be totally missed if they don't learn cursive very, very early.

 

My husband's family has trouble with automaticity in handwriting. My older son has dysgraphia. Older son learned ball and stick in K at school, which I now think is educational malpractice. He later learned cursive and does well with it, but I have a hard time getting him to use it because it wasn't his first way of learning. When you write ball and stick, you pick up the pencil, and when you bring it down, there really is no tactile cue to tell you whether you are writing a b or d or a or p. It's all sticks and circles. My son has to stop and start, erase, rewrite every third word when he writes ball and stick. If he writes cursive, he may spell wrong or sometimes forget how to make a letter (automaticity problems again), but he keeps moving forward with less stopping, fixing, etc. He can continue writing and not get hung up on small errors.

I am teaching my younger son cursive. He learned a little Italic handwriting (printing was introduced in preschool), and then we switched to New American Cursive as soon as we could. He is much more proficient in cursive already, and he's not even through the whole alphabet yet (we're taking it slowly). It took him nearly a year to be able to write an 8 without major effort, so cursive seems to fit his brain better. He's picking up on phonemic patterns better with cursive also. He doesn't make reversals with cursive, but he makes reversals in print and with writing numbers ALL THE TIME. I don't let him write print or cursive "alone" until he's proficient with the letters he's currently using. I also don't worry about neatness at first; we emphasize the proper motions. After a couple months of cursive, something just clicked in his brain, and his writing ability has snowballed. At first it was hard for him to write more than two letters together, and now he can write multi-syllable words if they contain letters he knows, both copied and from memory.