do kids need better fine motor skills to learn cursive first?

[caedmyn]

I was planning to teach my 5.5 YO cursive first, but when he tries to write a cursive letter, it involves all sorts of hand, arm, and head gymnastics. Granted we're only on day 2, but it seems much more difficult than it should be. He has picked up a few print letters on his own, and tries to copy others, and writes those without all the gymnastics. Do they need better fine motor skills to write in cursive? Is there something I should have him do first before attempting cursive?

[Bluegoat]

I don't think they need to be better to do cursive than manuscript.  But I do think that it pays to work on fine motor stuff in both cases to get it to a reasonable level, otherwise writing is very frustrating.  I would not be scared to put of writing until a little later if necessary while working on this, some kids are just later.

 

Making marks that aren't writing in the air, in things like sand or flour, or on paper - maybe big paper with paint, can help.  Colouring for some children and drawing can be rewarding.  Very tactile children might like fiddling with very small objects in various ways.

[nannyaunt]

Printing takes more fine motor. It actually takes more eye to hand coordination because you have to pick your pencil up and move it to a different spot.

[Dmmetler]

The handwriting without tears K teacher's book has a lot of good activities for general fine motor development that can be adapted to cursive first.

 

 

Edited April 11, 2016 by dmmetler

[Tsuga]

Neither of my kids could write well at 5.5 period. They could write large letters on a whiteboard.

 

Provided letter recognition, other age-appropriate skills (like picking up a button out of a pile), and general development are on track, I'd be willing to wait until 7. I did not correct my kids' handwriting until 7. DD2 is in immersion school and bizarrely has the best Chinese handwriting her teachers have seen in a child her age but she prints and writes cursive like a two-year-old. Like, it's shaky. However the above posts have me wondering if Chinese is just much more like cursive in many respects, at least in terms of forming the lines.

 

My plan is to have her do handwriting and spelling this summer, when she's a solid 7.

 

My 2c.

Edited April 11, 2016 by Tsuga

[HomeAgain]

I would not start with writing.  We started with fingers, then a sand box & stick, then a chalkboard with printed lines.  And before all that lots of fine motor activities.  The finger helped train the brain, the sand box train the grip, and the chalkboard slowed the writing down just enough to learn control.

[birchbark]

My second DS did not have the fine motor skills to write until he was 8-1/2. We worked on those skills with things like coloring with colored pencils until he was ready.

[kbutton]

Keep in mind that most cursive programs are meant for kids who already learned to write, hold a pencil, etc. in an earlier grade. Whatever you do, you probably need to break the cursive program down into smaller chunks. I found one intended for first graders and still had to break it down for teaching my younger son cursive (he did some printing early on, but he wanted to learn cursive and was mimicking the strokes already, but mucking it up and learning it wrong). The program also taught the alphabet in order, and i found it FAR more productive to start with an easy-stroke letter and add letters according to similar characteristics. My son did better tracing things at first also. It helped him keep his letters proportional without getting nutty about hitting the baseline, midline, etc. Tracing helped him learn to scale the strokes so that e and l were different. He could not have handled the sequencing at the same time he was trying to hit certain heights or stay on a line. That was too much at once for him. Tracing helped even that out without having to fuss at him about it.

 

The others mentioned ideas about the motor aspect and getting control. Motor planning is also key--if your child has trouble motor planning, that will influence how quickly you pace your instruction. 

 

If your child has ocular motor problems, that's another dimension of trouble. You find that out from a COVD optometrist. 

 

Barring major complications, just make sure you give a good foundation. Maybe it's not a big deal to let a kid write without correcting grip or letter formation, but my experience with two kiddos says that is not a great idea. Granted, mine both have dysgraphia (a learning disability related to writing), but any problem with formation or grip gets worse without feedback, IMO, and you don't really know if you have a kid who will end up having serious writing troubles. Kids who struggle with motor planning and are allowed to make letters any way that makes sense to them have to unlearn incorrect motor planning before learning better motor planning. Not fun. In addition, kids whose brains struggle to make sense of motor planning are usually bent towards doing things the least efficient and effective way--this is just how motor planning gums up in their brains. It's not their fault. My first kiddo learned to write ball and stick print in a school setting. It was awful to unlearn and help him back tremendously. It didn't cause dysgraphia, but it certainly exacerbates it.

[Janeway]

I think print is important to learn so I think a 5 yr old should be working on that. And I definitely prefer the ball stick method where the child first learns to write good circles and lines and slants before moving in to actual letters and numbers. There is just a progression. I feel cursive is pretty worthless in our society. A person will need print in order to read (books are not typically written in cursive) and if they want to do engineering or label anything. But cursive is usually used for essays. If they are writing something along the lines of an essay, they will likely type it. I still teach my children both, but I would never skip print.

[luuknam]

From an OT/motor development perspective, it is actually easier (and better) for children to learn to do cursive, first. Cursive was always taught first, until early 20th century. 

 

I think most schools still do this, but when I learned to write in the 1990s in The Netherlands practically every school started with cursive. They also didn't start until 1st grade though - I couldn't even write my name when I was in kindergarten. Kindergarten did involve a lot of fine motor activities though - just zero writing. I turned 6 a couple of weeks before the start of 1st grade and I was one of the youngest in my grade.

 

I think print is important to learn so I think a 5 yr old should be working on that.  A person will need print in order to read (books are not typically written in cursive)

 

I, like *all* the other kids I knew, taught myself to print in 7th grade, when we weren't required to write in cursive anymore, and we all wanted to print because it was the 'grown-up' way of writing. Normal kids don't need explicit instruction to learn to print (if they can write in cursive well - we did have penmanship classes a few times a week in elementary school).

 

Somehow, none of us needed to know how to print in order to figure out how to read books either. They started teaching reading in 1st grade as well, and everybody figured it out.

Edited April 13, 2016 by luuknam

[PagesandFields]

Mine has motor delays and I really wish I had started with cursive... I really do.

[PagesandFields]

Can I ask you how you backed up and readdressed motor planning? This is one of the main reasons I really wish I had done cursive, where the pencil doesn't lift up from the paper...

 

Keep in mind that most cursive programs are meant for kids who already learned to write, hold a pencil, etc. in an earlier grade. Whatever you do, you probably need to break the cursive program down into smaller chunks. I found one intended for first graders and still had to break it down for teaching my younger son cursive (he did some printing early on, but he wanted to learn cursive and was mimicking the strokes already, but mucking it up and learning it wrong). The program also taught the alphabet in order, and i found it FAR more productive to start with an easy-stroke letter and add letters according to similar characteristics. My son did better tracing things at first also. It helped him keep his letters proportional without getting nutty about hitting the baseline, midline, etc. Tracing helped him learn to scale the strokes so that e and l were different. He could not have handled the sequencing at the same time he was trying to hit certain heights or stay on a line. That was too much at once for him. Tracing helped even that out without having to fuss at him about it.

 

The others mentioned ideas about the motor aspect and getting control. Motor planning is also key--if your child has trouble motor planning, that will influence how quickly you pace your instruction.

 

If your child has ocular motor problems, that's another dimension of trouble. You find that out from a COVD optometrist.

 

Barring major complications, just make sure you give a good foundation. Maybe it's not a big deal to let a kid write without correcting grip or letter formation, but my experience with two kiddos says that is not a great idea. Granted, mine both have dysgraphia (a learning disability related to writing), but any problem with formation or grip gets worse without feedback, IMO, and you don't really know if you have a kid who will end up having serious writing troubles. Kids who struggle with motor planning and are allowed to make letters any way that makes sense to them have to unlearn incorrect motor planning before learning better motor planning. Not fun. In addition, kids whose brains struggle to make sense of motor planning are usually bent towards doing things the least efficient and effective way--this is just how motor planning gums up in their brains. It's not their fault. My first kiddo learned to write ball and stick print in a school setting. It was awful to unlearn and help him back tremendously. It didn't cause dysgraphia, but it certainly exacerbates it.

[HomeAgain]

One resource we have liked to teach letter formation is a stencil.  We found these by Schoolrite: http://www.school-rite.com/ They encourage one-stroke formation for cursive and italic print, and fit directly on the children's paper.  It's a little bit of extra aid to those who need help remembering how the letter is formed.

[SparklyUnicorn]

Mine has motor delays and I really wish I had started with cursive... I really do.

 

FWIW, I started with cursive thinking it would help, and it didn't make a difference.  There was still a lot of difficulty and there still is (he is 14 now).  He can write legibly if he tries to.  Otherwise...mmmm it's not great. 

Not saying this would be your experience too.  Just saying that cursive is not necessarily magical for this problem. 

[Tsuga]

And if handwriting is your kid's biggest problem they are truly in great company, so at least there's that. :)

[kbutton]

Can I ask you how you backed up and readdressed motor planning? This is one of the main reasons I really wish I had done cursive, where the pencil doesn't lift up from the paper...

 

 

We started with single letters, usually lowercase, and I added letters with similar strokes one at a time, very slowly. When we started combing letters, we'd do it a couple of letters at a time. If we knew l and a, we'd do combinations of them--al, la, all, lala, whatever we could. We did big writing, often with eyes closed. Eyes open meant more difficulties, believe it or not. The hardest thing for him was learning to write an 8. It took about a year and a half to make it completely independently! A lot of that time, I drew and x, and then he traced over the x while making his 8. He could make a perfect 8 if he closed his eyes.

 

We had vision therapy last fall (long after learning to write). He had some retained primitive reflexes that were improved/eliminated through vision therapy, and that has been the biggest help in improving his motor planning, not just in handwriting.

 

You might look up some websites for developmental coordination disorder if you have motor planning issues. Also consider checks with an OT and a vision therapist. Make sure you get solid answers about checking directly for retained reflexes (not just watching to see if they see evidence of them but not checking directly). 

[FO4UR]

Cursive is more ergonomic for the human hand.

 

I've tried cursive first, and then I had a child who taught herself print before I had a chance to teach her cursive, and then I decided to do D'Nealian Manuscript in K/1 for my 3rd child.  He moved to cursive later, and it was seamless.

 

Sandpaper letters. Do all of the teaching of formation and such on sandpaper letters.  After all of the letters are solid with sandpaper letters, pick a paper/pencil program.

 

A gel pen (or fountain pen) helps with fluid cursive.

[caedmyn]

It had occurred to me that there weren't any pre-writing strokes in this cursive program, so that might be helpful. I will have him try writing them with his finger in a rice tray or something.

 

I wouldn't mind having him wait a while to learn to write, but he's been trying to write print letters on his own (and he doesn't have difficulty forming those, though he writes many incorrectly), so maybe if he's not able to form the cursive strokes yet I should introduce print so that he learns to form what he is writing correctly.

 

I have read that it's more natural for kids to learn cursive first, and better for kids with dyslexia. His older siblings have some symptoms of dyslexia so I wanted him to learn cursive first.

[boscopup]

I tried with my middle son, who has struggled to learn to read and write (reading has taken off now). For him, straight lines were much easier. He really had trouble with curves. I could never get him to the point of actually writing a cursive letter on his own, so we switched to manuscript and he did ok. His writing still looks like a Kindergartner's (he's nearing the end of 3rd grade and is 9.5 years old), but he can make it legible if he writes large enough. He's been working on cursive this year, and it's ok sort of. I used Zaner-Bloser, which breaks down the strokes very well. That has been good for him. But he still can't write much more than one or two letters on his own. Thinking about what comes next is very difficult for him. With manuscript, he doesn't have to have the entire word planned out beforehand. Also, while learning to read, the books being in manuscript and his writing being cursive was confusing him.

 

My child with the most beautiful cursive is my 6 year old. He learned manuscript first, then learned cursive this year with Pentime 3. His handwriting is gorgeous. He also had crazy good fine motor skills from an early age. Being left handed hasn't slowed him down at all in cursive either. He does all his copywork in cursive now and will soon do all his schoolwork in cursive. He's recently started writing his name in cursive on his Bible class papers, just for fun. :)

 

I should also mention that *I* find cursive more difficult than manuscript. I use it regularly now, but if I'm taking notes or needing to write quickly, manuscript it is. Cursive takes too much mental planning at the beginning of the word, and my hand ends up throwing in extra loops or humps if I try to write quickly. I used cursive exclusively in school from grades 2-6, then they let us use whatever we wanted in grade 7. I immediately switched to manuscript!

[Bluegoat]

It had occurred to me that there weren't any pre-writing strokes in this cursive program, so that might be helpful. I will have him try writing them with his finger in a rice tray or something.

 

I wouldn't mind having him wait a while to learn to write, but he's been trying to write print letters on his own (and he doesn't have difficulty forming those, though he writes many incorrectly), so maybe if he's not able to form the cursive strokes yet I should introduce print so that he learns to form what he is writing correctly.

 

I have read that it's more natural for kids to learn cursive first, and better for kids with dyslexia. His older siblings have some symptoms of dyslexia so I wanted him to learn cursive first.

 

I taught manuscrpt for this reason with my second student - dd had started to print on her own.

 

I wished I had just stuck to cursive first, as there were a number of issues which it would have avoided.  In hindsight I don't think it would have made any difference that she was doing manuscript independantly.

[zoobie]

Do you have a little sand box? Tracing letters in sand first with a finger, then with a chopstick held like a pencil can be very helpful.