Method For Elementary Kids

[Soledad Elias]

Greetings,

I'm trying to teach my son cursive and need to decide on a style.

I was brought up on Palmer and somewhere acquired some European style capitals, so I enjoy beautiful calligraphy. I've been teaching junior with Handwritting without Tears until I saw what strokes they were doing for continuous round letters and they go sideways from the top. What???? I decided then and there that we would do something more traditional. My problem with Palmer is the Q, which I dislike. So I'm thinking of going with a Zaner-Blosser if I can find a fun manual to use. HWT was fun, which was why we were in it.

 

For those of you who have children or teach, what do you recommend and what is your criteria.

Thanks in advance for any advice......

 

 

[HDoug]

This is slightly OT, but I really love this video of how they teach kids cursive in France.

http://www.teachfind.com/teachers-tv/france-teaching-handwriting

Doug

[Lively]

Very interesting video. My kids are learning-to-write age at the moment.

 

Edited to make my reply more relevant to the original post...

 

Honestly I wouldn't worry about a particular style - choose the letter shapes you like best and teach him those. I was taught cursive from grade 2 (in a 2/3 class). In Australia cursive styles aren't named after anyone. The education department in each state publishes materials for teachers to follow, and each state's is a bit different to the others (except I think WA and NT now use VIC's version).

 

In my day there would be a poster issued each year to go on the classroom wall that showed the letter forms, and that was it as far as I know. I've still got my old exercise books and we did rows of zig-zags, waves, arches, vertical lines, circles, grapevines etc. to practise the basic shapes, and sometimes coloured them in afterwards.

Edited July 9, 2015 by Lively