Ideas and resources
Do our children really need to learn cursive writing in today’s world? Um YES! I am a big believer in keeping things old school. Here is an interesting article outlining 5 important reasons why your children should continue to learn how to do cursive writing. Don’t worry though if your School decides to remove it from the curriculum then you can create your own writing sheets and teach your children at home.
If you have a little one learning their letters at home or at school, it can be helpful to know a bit about the science that goes into learning your letters and how the experts teach letter recognition.
Knowing the alphabet is the basis for learning how to read, so it’s important to get it down. Kids need to know the differences between letters, to be able to recognize their shapes and to know what sounds the letters make individually before they can start combining them in words.
Proud to Be Primary suggests starting with letters that are meaningful to the child such as the letters in their name. Tracing letters and doing letter matching and other games with letters are great ways to start kids on the road to recognizing letters. Then things like alphabet songs, books and picture cards can be added in to help with phonics and the basics of reading.
This Crafty Mom talks about using the Carnine method for teaching letter recognition, which starts with all lowercase letters and separates letters that look similar to each other (like b and d, or c and e). This makes a lot of sense because it’s not as confusing, and you can learn alphabetical order later.
How Wee Learn uses a slightly different order but the idea is the same, though she also would start with the letters in a child’s name, then go on with the rest of them. This post includes more fun games for letter recognition including digging up letters and taping letters on the floor for kids to throw paper airplanes on.
Looking for more fun ways to learn the alphabet and letter recognition? This Kaboom game from The Many Little Joys is easy to make, fun for little kids, and once you’ve used it to learn letters you can make a new version for sight words, numbers, basic math problems and more.
Early Learning Ideas has tons of letter activities including collages, crafts, tactile letter cards, letter recognition activities and much more. Do one letter a day or a week and your kiddos will know their letters in no time. And be sure to grab these cute printable alphabet books from Life Over Cs, which give kids easy activities for recognizing letters and words that begin with them.
Yes, I was very dismayed when I found out the schools around here stopped teaching cursive a decade ago. How are kids supposed to read historical documents, sign a check or contract?
Schools are dumbing down the kids now.
*rant* So americans are still writing cursive the same way it was written in the 18th century? Cos over here it has evolved. The cursive I learned in school in the 80’s is different from what my old aunt and grandma learned and that’s different from 19th c cursive, which is different from 18th c cursive. In fact, most in my and my parents’ generations struggle with 19th c cursive and find 18th close to impossible to decipher most of the time. My sis is into genealogy and she hates going back to the 18th c because it’s so hard to read the handwriting (not least since you have to keep in mind that we all have our personal style and that included the priests writing the documents). And she has spent several years reading old cursive. Kids can’t automatically read historical documents just because they can write in cursive (and, honestly how many adults have ever used their knowledge of it to read important documents themselves?). No, I don’t buy that argument.
Knowledge of old cursive is useful and, yes, calligraphy is beautiful. That doesn’t mean it needs to be mandatory in school, other things are much more important. I do however get the importance of signatures, one does still use that sometimes to sign documents, but it is possible to create a signature without being skilled at cursive. It doesn’t have to be legible to begin with. *end of rant*
As for what killed cursive, now that computers are being blamed, this is a good article: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/ballpoint-pens-object-lesson-history-handwriting/402205/