Teaching my daughter proper handwriting has always been one of the more difficult challenges for us. I have tried different methods with her so was very excited to try CursiveLogic Quick-Start Pack and The Art of Cursive from CursiveLogic.
My daughter’s difficulties with handwriting
My daughter loves to write stories and lyrics to songs, but the actual handwriting part is not her favourite. This is our greatest struggle in her schooling as a large part of school work requires increasingly more writing.
Even tho we spend a few minutes a week working on handwriting and printing individual letters, it still has remained a skill that needs improvement.
I looked into teaching her cursive writing as I read that cursive writing requires less fine motor skills, and certain issues we were having with printing, like writing letters backwards, are not issues with cursive.
I did shop around and found a cursive writing book. We were working through it, but it is more or less here’s a letter, look at it, trace it a few times and then try to write the letter on your own.
CursiveLogic Quick-Start Pack
I was thrilled tho when we received the cursive writing workbooks from CursiveLogic. After looking through it, my first thought was, this is how cursive should be taught. It’s actually instructional, a method to teach instead of a trace-and-then-do method.
The CursiveLogic Quick-Start Pack contains a workbook and a 48 minute webinar that explains more how to teach the method.
The workbook is spiral bound with a thicker weight quality paper. And it contains 3 pages of dry-erase pages. First perusal screams high quality.
I feel like the webinar would be more important for a teacher in a classroom. As a homeschooling parent I feel it was more of a bonus, but not really necessary as I found the workbook had everything I needed.
Having said that, I started my daughter on the workbook before I watched the webinar. When watching it I realized some of the main points of the instruction had totally went over my head. It’s not that it was missing from the workbook, it’s just some things made more sense to me after watching the webinar, which meant I was able to share that instruction with my daughter.
CursiveLogic Method
Instead of teaching each individual letter, as separate letters to learn, the lower case letters are taught in groups – grouped by shape. There are 4 shapes.
All the letters that share a shape are taught together. So for example, there are 6 letters that share the first shape, the Orange Oval: “a, c, d, g, q, and o”. Instead of learning each letter individually, the child is taught to write those 6 letters together as a string. So the child learns how to connect the letters from the beginning.
Each shape has a theme color which aids with memory, and a catch-phrase that the child is supposed to say as they write it.
A child in a classroom setting will be able to master cursive writing in about 10 weeks. A homeschooler that gets one and one instruction can work through it much faster. There are 10 lessons, and each lesson is split up into days. However, especially homeschoolers can and should work at their own individual pace. With my 7 year old we did just a bit less than a day most of the time, but sometimes a bit more.
The Art of Cursive
The Art of Cursive is a coloring book for adults to learn cursive or improve on our general penmanship.
The quality of the paper is a thicker weight paper, not too far off from card stock. It’s not an instructional book, so it would not be a good replacement for the actual workbook.
Sometimes our kids get all the fun looking workbooks. I enjoyed getting to improve my own cursive writing. I found it relaxing, and a nice past time for those moments when us mothers have some time to kill, for example while waiting for our child’s sports or dance practice to finish.
My Final Thoughts
In my opinion, this is the way to learn cursive. If I ever have to teach another child, this is the method of my choice. It’s logical and it makes sense. Also, I find it simplifies things so kids actually get it.
From the very beginning, it taught how to hold the pencil, how to position the paper etc. Even tho I tried to teach my daughter this before, she would fight me on this. But now as it’s different, she actually co-operated with me, and for the first time ever holds her pencil correctly.
I also like that a goal of the book and a feature of it, is for the child to learn how to sign their name. My daughter really wants to learn that which helps her with motivation. She doesn’t fight me to do the cursive and enjoys the workbook. Sometimes she gets to write with different color markers, which adds to the enjoyment. And I like how she analyzes her own writing to see what she could improve on. The one thing she does fight me on is saying the steps verbally, but all things considered, I’m ok with that.
