Transitioning from print to cursive.

[sweetpea3829]

So how did you go about transitioning between print and cursive? Did you teach an intermediary print first, or just switch cold turkey?

 

What curriculum did you use for cursive?

 

Anything you would do differently next time?

 

My crew have learned handwriting from HWT and I'm planning on teaching them cursive either this summer or next.

[Hunter]

HWT is vertical, so a vertical cursive will be an easier transition than a slanted cursive.

 

Are they all righties and not dyslexic? I now refuse to teach a right slanted hand to dyslexic lefties. The required page tilt is so extreme that they are writing almost upside down, and this is a huge burden on a dyslexic.

 

Are they reading and spelling by syllable and not still by phonograms? Cursive writing requires multitasking and thinking ahead to the next letter before completing the current one to choose the correct connector. Beginner spellers can copy, but struggle to compose in cursive. Early cursive requires postponing composition for some students.

[sweetpea3829]

Good points, Hunter. I have three righties and one leftie. The leftie (my youngest) is not yet out of the dyslexia woods. I don't think he is dyslexic, but I also haven't completely ruled it out yet, either.

 

He is also a beginning speller and is only halfway through AAS1.

 

Sounds like maybe next summer instead of this summer, will be better to start.

[HomeAgain]

We start with D'nealian, because it has all the cursive markers: slanted, one stroke letters, rounded, tails....from there it is a very simple switch to cursive because we just add "ski slopes".  It's why I think Zaner-Bloser is one of the worst things in the world for children.  It's teaching without educating, without knowing where you're going next and preparing for it.  You teach sticks and balls, and three years later introduce a totally different script..ugh.  It makes things terribly hard on children to have to start from the beginning.  Again.  Possibly the third time, if they come from a background of being taught capital letters as a means of writing before getting to learn the lowercase alphabet. 

[Hunter]

I find the issues around cursive writing fascinating. It is far more complex than general literature admits.

 

I watch every single video, and read every link, and follow up on every lead that supposedly teaches an easy peasy way for lefties to write with a right-slanted hand, and have never seen one that will work for dyslexics.

 

"All lefties need to do is ..." Yeah, right. Whatever. Every trick I've seen will sometimes work for gifted kids, but often the tricks don't work at all when put into practice.

 

I really like Don Potters slanted hand instructions. But they don't work for dyslexic lefties, and over half my students turn out to be dyslexic lefties. They beg for a slanted hand. I am not able to give them that. I cannot change the rules of physics and they cannot write upside down.

 

I still pay attention to new leads, but I no longer expect them to work. I have firmly committed to Spalding lowercase with ball and stick capitals. I'm done mucking around.

 

Sometimes I teach cursive first, and sometimes manuscript first, depending on the situation. But cursive first is like tying a student's hand behind her back. If I'm prepared to coddle her through the early levels that is fine. But early cursive requires extra abilities in composition, that manuscript does not.

 

I do not think that cursive first mixes well with early lessons of an OG curriculum and neither did Romalda Spalding. Romalda knew all about cursive first and rejected it.

 

Blumenfeld's stuff works with cursive first. There is a new edition by Blumenfeld called Phonics for Success. You can get it at Amazon for $9.99 plus $3.99 shipping from a private seller. That combined with oral composition and copywork makes cursive first very doable.

[Hunter]

The letter formation scripts for DN are lacking, compared to ZB and Don Potter. If someone tweaked some ZB/DP scripts to DN, I would recommend it more often, at least for righties.

 

Another issue with a right slant, is that everything even numerals should be slanted.

 

Few first grade teachers are willing to try and adapt the vertical math curriculum to a slanted hand.

 

A lot of DN manuscript instruction is just having kids draw the letters not write them. And no discussion of slant. I have seen some horrible DN mess. Horrible.

[sweetpea3829]

I rejected DN because I had heard that it didn't make the transition any easier and confused 1st graders! I taught DN when I student taught 1st grade. It had been my first experience with it and I liked it. But I later heard that it was no longer considered good.

 

Now my leftie already has a hard enough time with handwriting. Turning the paper to avoid smudging has been difficult for him. His fine motor skills are somewhat weaker than my NT righties.

 

Then there's my oldest. She did not qualify for a dyslexia diagnosis but she does have *some* markers. She has significant spatial motor integration issues. Teaching her how to print was a nightmare. Somebody suggested I teach her cursive right away and I had to laugh. Her hardest letters were the ones with any kind of looping (e especially). I'm not sure she will be able to learn cursive.

 

But....they all want to learn it and have been trying to teach it to themselves. And I want them to at least be able to read it and write their names.

[Jess4879]

We start cursive in Grade 4.  We use A Reason for Handwriting because I like the way it looks and it isn't overly loopy.  We use the practice pages for learning the letter strokes for each letter and then we transition to copy work.  This year my oldest (grade 6) is required to do the majority of her work in cursive. 

 

 

[FO4UR]

The Essentials in Spelling Grade 2 in my siggie is an introduction to both cursive and spelling.  The first 30 lessons are all cursive.  The pages are only a part of the lesson.  I recommend using sandpaper letters and a large chalk/whiteboard while learning formation.  The remaining lessons merge cursive practice with beginning spelling skills, heavy on phonograms and visualization in the 2nd grade year.

 

 

The letter formation scripts for DN are lacking, compared to ZB and Don Potter. If someone tweaked some ZB/DP scripts to DN, I would recommend it more often, at least for righties.
 

 

I view the formation scripts as a crutch that the children soon outgrow anyway. I think Sandpaper Letters are a better crutch, feeling the strokes, b/c writing is not a verbal skill but a sensory skill.  Granted, my opinion is largely formed by working with a dyslexic who could spout off the Spalding scripts with perfection and write.it.all.inverted-backwards-and-upside-freaking-down meanwhile. Grain of salt. :lol:

 

I've also seen cursive-first folks recommend writing cursive letters separated for K/1st grade.  Why not just teach D'Nealian if that is your approach?  

 

 

 

 

 

[Hunter]

Cusive-first people that teach separate cursive letters have often chosen a hand that they feel is superior to the the DN hand.

[HomeAgain]

The letter formation scripts for DN are lacking, compared to ZB and Don Potter. If someone tweaked some ZB/DP scripts to DN, I would recommend it more often, at least for righties.

 

Another issue with a right slant, is that everything even numerals should be slanted.

 

Few first grade teachers are willing to try and adapt the vertical math curriculum to a slanted hand.

 

A lot of DN manuscript instruction is just having kids draw the letters not write them. And no discussion of slant. I have seen some horrible DN mess. Horrible.

 

We use Scott, Foresman & Co, the older nonconsumable DN books.  They all are very exacting on letter formation and how to write, starting from posture and how to turn the paper to showing how to form each letter correctly (with common mistakes as examples).  I'm not sure what you mean between drawing and writing - writing is the art of drawing letters.

[Peplophoros]

I'm having a difficult time transitioning my 4th grader to cursive, but we've been using Pentime curriculum, which is helping a lot, because one day it's practicing a letter, the next day, cursive copywork.  

 

We started him with HWT cursive (we also used it for print, which was fine) and it was a HUGE mistake.  The writing couldn't look more ugly.  I'd honestly prefer he print to HWT cursive.

[hollyhock]

We switch cold turkey (no intermediary print). After trying out a few cursive books, the one I like best is Teach Me Joy Cursive Handwriting. I think you can get it as a download at Currclick. It's simple but pretty and has lots of practice. I had one left-handed 1st grader do it and one right handed 3rd grader, so it seems to work for everyone here.

[Hunter]

Ideally, slanted cursive writing is NOT drawing letters. It is letters made up of a combination of named strokes. It is all about learning the strokes, not the letters. Kind of like the Karate Kid--wax on, wax off.

 

ZB, Don Potter, Spencerian, and Peterson are examples.

[ScoutTN]

We went from HWT print to NAC in 2nd grade. Both of mine are lefties, no LDs.

I have continued print copywork while they are learning cursive and then gradually blend everythng over to cursive by about 4th grade. Dd moved faster than that, but she is a natural speller and composes easily. Ds is making good progress but has to really think about spelling and composition so he just does copywork in cursive for now. His writing is very nice when he puts some effort into it. Dd's is fast, but not lovely.

 

Both of my kids have a fairly vertical cursive and neither of them likes to turn the paper, which is what I did.

[FO4UR]

Ideally, slanted cursive writing is NOT drawing letters. It is letters made up of a combination of named strokes. It is all about learning the strokes, not the letters. Kind of like the Karate Kid--wax on, wax off.

 

ZB, Don Potter, Spencerian, and Peterson are examples.

 

 

I've tried Peterson and Spencerian.

 

My dyslexic, especially, is good with drawing. I occasionally have him focus on hitting the baseline consistently or some particular stroke of a particular letter, but mostly he sees letters as wholes.  He likes filling in the Spencerian wb exercises, but when he's writing he reverts to drawing letters.

[Ellie]

No intermediate between manuscript and cursive. Too much to remember, lol.

 

Introduced cursive, continued to require manuscript for some things (arithmetic, labeling maps), slowly required more cursive, until only cursive from about 9yo on.

[Guest]

None. The cursive I taught my kids changes only the lowercase k [looks like a D'nealian print k}. Went from HWT to our UK cursive in about a week. No new forms to learn=easy transition. I just wrote in the new cursive using a light colored pencil and had them trace for a few days to get the joins down. Its been UK cursive ever since. Same with Miss Priss.

[forty-two]

Learning cursive has been a slow process for my maybe-dyslexic lefty. Smith-hand is our program, but I've added a *lot* to it. The program itself teaches four strokes and then teaches letters that use similar strokes together, along with a few practice words. Moving quickly from letters to words, often with two syllables or more (some of which she couldn't spell while writing in print), was a complete no-go for dd9. I ended up moving from individual letters to phonograms (indexed a list of phonograms by Smith-hand lessons), doing about 5 a day (repeating the troublesome ones), which took about three months. Then we moved to CVC words, going through ~260 of them at 20/day, which was relatively easy practice (it was combination spelling and cursive practice - I have all the words written on flash cards in Dekodiphukan sound pictures, so it's kind of like visual dictation ;)). Now we are working through CCVC words, which has been a bit harder.

 

I don't know when she'll move to doing all cursive - some time after we get through all the one syllable words in her old reading program and go through Spelling Through Morphographs (which I think I'm going to require her to do in cursive - we'll see how it goes).

 

(Smith-hand is a slant hand, but I'm pretty sure she writes it mostly vertically.)

[lacell]

I just want to say I'm in love with the French sounding Montessori cursive app. It's amazing, especially with a stylus.

[Kuovonne]

DD has always had bad handwriting but likes to write.

 

She became interested in cursive, so I taught her myself using just notebook paper.

I can still write in cursive, so I just showed her how I form the letters without a progrm.

I started with the easiest letters, and and had her writing words with those two letters.

When she had those down, I taught the next letter and then had her practice with words.

The trick was to give her only words where she knew all the letters.

Eventually she had all the lower case letters that begin at the baseline.

Then I added the letters that end at the midline and had to reteach how to write all

the letters starting at the midline.

 

I think that DD (9 years old) caught on quickly. The whole process took only about two or three weeks

before I could require cursive for her entire daily spelling lesson.

She does most of her other school work in print but will often use cursive outside of school.

(For example, she wrote at thank you card in cursive.)

[lacell]

I find the issues around cursive writing fascinating. It is far more complex than general literature admits.

 

 

Blumenfeld's stuff works with cursive first. There is a new edition by Blumenfeld called Phonics for Success. You can get it at Amazon for $9.99 plus $3.99 shipping from a private seller. That combined with oral composition and copywork makes cursive first very doable.

 

Why do you say Blumenfeld's works with cursive?

[HS Mom in NC]

We did Getty Dubay Italic Script because the transition from print to cursive is so incredibly easy.  The basic strokes of each letter are the same in print and cursive so you only have to add a simple stroke in between letters. I also used it because I despise frilly cursive and I wanted something sleek that maximizes readability and speed.

Edited January 2, 2016 by Homeschool Mom in AZ

[Hunter]

Why do you say Blumenfeld's works with cursive?

The Blumenfeld texts have the student writing full sentences with just a few letters.

 

The Blumenfeld texts TEACH cursive first instead of EXPECTING cursive first. Some curricula try and paste cursive first onto a method that isn't designed for it.

[lacell]

Is that the same as Alpha Phonics?

[Hunter]

Is that the same as Alpha Phonics?

Alpha-phonics revised and Phonics for Success are the best. How to Tutor and Alpha-Phonics original are good. And then there is even a free chapter from his first book that is adequate.