Learning manuscript and cursive at the same time?

[lacell]

Is this doable or totally nuts? Seems to me that if children can learn two languages, they could learn to styles of writing concurrently. I think I remember reading once that bilingual children take a little longer to learn language but catch up. Would it be the same for writing if a child was taught manuscript and cursive at the same time? I'm thinking of D'Nealian print and D'Nealian cursive.

[lacell]

sorry. duplicate. i keep doing that!

[FO4UR]

I wouldn't bother to try and TEACH both at the same time.  Start with DN manuscript, and it will take a few weeks to move into cursive.

 

That said, in that transition year, I have had my middle two kids only do handwriting/spelling lessons in cursive and then allow manuscript for everything else.  Beyond that is cursive for schoolwork.

[Arcadia]

My oldest wanted to learn cursive before K so I printed out free worksheets and he had no problem. He also did copy work in chinese when he was 2+ for preschool chinese class.

 

Why would bilingual children take longer to learn languages as long as they have a good instructor for each language?

 

My youngest wasn't interested in cursive so he learned cursive in 2nd grade using the HWOT that the charter school supplied.

[Ellie]

I suspect that doing so would cause them to mix cursive and manuscript instead of using only one or the other.

 

I wouldn't do it. 

[desertflower]

I wouldn't do it. I think it's hard enough for our little guys to learn just to write. Fine motor skills take longer to develop than learning 2 languages simultaneously. That's why it's easier to teach orally and scribe for our little guys.

[lacell]

Several good points.

[lacell]

I do feel a little pushed into it though, because my son self-taught manuscript and he's forming some letters incorrectly. Should I just ignore it? His cursive lowercase letters are established. He knows some uppercase cursive.

[Arcadia]

I'll correct those manuscript letters that he form wrongly.

 

As to your other question, when my boys trace the letters or words with their finger, it is more the visual senses than tactile senses that is engaged for them.

So tracing a letter with a finger commits a visual memory of the letter name and sound while writing with a crayon or pencil was what cement the writing portion. My boys could say they think the letter look like this from memory but it is after practice that they can write correctly without thinking. That is especially true for chinese characters since there is stroke order. Each kid is different as usual.

 

My oldest had a letter size alphabet chart which shows the uppercase and lowercase in both manuscript and cursive. I printed off the internet at that time.

[desertflower]

I would correct it if it's a handwriting assignment like from hwot, but not if he's writing for fun. For example, a letter to grandma or just wants to write a story on his own time.

 

At least that's what I do.

[Ellie]

I do feel a little pushed into it though, because my son self-taught manuscript and he's forming some letters incorrectly. Should I just ignore it? His cursive lowercase letters are established. He knows some uppercase cursive.

 

No, you shouldn't ignore it. He needs to write his letters correctly.

[Sarah0000]

We were in the exact same position. DS started writing letters in manuscript on his own by copying from things around the house. I let him do whatever while his letters were still different sizes with weird spacing and such. Once he started writing more evenly I taught him the correct formation using full page letters that he traced with his fingers. Then he started copywork in Pentime 1 book 2 for a little bit to cement the correct formation and to gain fluency with the flow of handwriting. We did not do ball and stick at all for actual lessons, although that is mostly what he was doing on his own before formal lessons. It only took about three weeks before he was doing copywork pretty well in manuscript.

 

But he said he wanted to learn cursive and I thought he would be better at that actually. So first we practiced tracing and reading in cursive for about a month (he was already use to seeing cursive since that's how I write) with homemade worksheets using http://www.worksheetworks.com/english/writing/handwriting/handwriting-cursive-trace-old.html.  Just this week he started copying on his own using select worksheets from http://www.kidzone.ws/cursive/index.htm plus finger writing in kinetic sand. He'll probably do this for about three weeks then move to standard copywork. He is using manuscript when he writes anything else other than his actual handwriting lessons.

 

I've found that there's a lot of overlap between manuscript and cursive. Most of the letters are similar enough that I can use the same verbiage to teach him the formation. I did think it was helpful to learn spacing and sizing in manuscript first since the loopiness of cursive makes it a bit harder to judge the size. So he has been learning both manuscript and cursive within a very short timeframe of each other, but he only focused on letter formation for one at a time, for the most part. Some of the more rare letters he is learning the manuscript and cursive at one time, like q and z. It has not been a problem so far.