Cursive vs. Print

[Lisa in the UP of MI]

DD is about to turn 4 and is very interested in letters. I had intended to teach her to write lowercase cursive letters first. We are working on cursive sandpaper letters but she is definitely not ready to move to the next step with them. However, she has just recently started trying to print capital letters on the Magnadoodle. For the most part the letters look okay but she is not forming them in the accepted way. Should I switch gears and just go along with her, since she is obviously interested in capital print letters? Or should I just keep doing what I'm doing and let her "play" with printing letters?

Thanks for any advice you can give.

[sweetbaby]

4 is still young. I would allow her to play with printing letters. But when she starts, I think starting with printing capital letters first will work best. It did for my gang.:D

[midwestbelle]

I started my girls on printing. We did lowercase letters first then switched to cursive by the end of 1st grade. dd2 had horrible handwriting and the switch helped a great deal, it also cut out the reversal of b and d.

 

Since that went so well, I had planned to start ds on cursive in Pre-K last year, but the fine motor skills he needed to write weren't there. I backed off until this summer and started with the Magna Doodle. Aren't those things fabulous!

 

Anyway, since he had learned his letter sounds with print and was more comfortable there, I gave up the cursive. He is now printing lower case letters very well and we are starting to work on the capitals as they come up in our writing. I start with lowercase because I wanted to teach them that capital letters were reserved for words that were special.

[FO4UR]

I posted this question not too long ago LOL!!!:lol:

 

My ds is 5, with fm delay, and we have been working on cursive formation and tracing. He didn't even draw stick people, let alone letters just a few weeks ago. One day he just started writing in all CAPS, (after all the work we had done in cursive:tongue_smilie:).

 

I don't discourage the print caps, but I am still teaching cursive. I have been also teaching the print caps as they come along, just so he will do them correctly.

 

I have gone round and round about dong HWOT which starts with caps. I decided to order Abeka K5 cursive, and we'll see how that goes when it gets here.

 

My thinking: He is picking up print on his own with very little guidance from me, and he will not want to spend oodles of time on handwriting in 2-3rd grades (just a guess LOL), so we will purpose to learn cursive now and let the printing come as it will. Also, he already knows the formations for cursive from the work we have been doing, so why switch? This is just my opinion, and an untested one at that:tongue_smilie:, but I thought I'd share.

[In The Great White North]

Here's the article on why one would want to teach cursive first.

 

http://www.howtotutor.com/cursive.htm

 

It makes sense to me but I happened on it too late for my dc.