Remedial Cursive

My children are learning cursive in school for their first letters (or sounds as they think of them at this point.)   As we became more aware of what happens in a Montessori classroom, we've grown to respect the overall process of how the children learn particular skills.    Of late though, I've been thinking a lot about cursive personally.

I learned cursive and block letters, but I believe I learned block letters first.   Cursive is designed to help you write more quickly and with less stress on the hand and I remember finding cursive both interesting and frustrating.   I remember being confused at how some letters connected to others.   I was able to write a lowercase 'b' relatively the same every time in block letters, but when it had different letters before and after it in a word, there was no telling how it would turn out.

Today as an adult, I write in a combination of block and cursive.  I hadn't really paid much attention to this other than to say I had terrible penmanship, until my children began to come home with new sounds.   They're taught "sounds" and those sounds are the sound the particular letter makes, such as, "luh" for the letter L.    The name of the letter isn't actually important in learning how to recognize the letter, know how the letter sounds in words and write the letter.  

So we're learning cursive lowercase letters together.   I have a chalk board at home and a set of the sandpaper letters they use at school.   When letters come up, we go to the chalk board, write them out, trace them and then discuss what words start with that sound.    A favorite game now is the, "I spy with my little eye" game.   They play this game in school all the time with the added phrase of, "and I spy something that starts with the sound, 'buh, buh, buh."   We play on the way to school a lot.

I digress though because this post was meant to be about cursive writing and my terrible penmanship.    So with all the focus on cursive letters, I decided I'd better find out if I even remembered how to write in full, non-broken cursive.    Was it faster or slower than my cobbled together mash-up of writing styles?  And could I improve my writing by going to full-cursive handwriting.  

I'm still in the early stages but I can tell you the first stage was uncomfortable.  I had to look up things several times.  I wasn't sure how to do the capital of some letters and there were connections that eluded me.    I think I'm past that now.   Then, there's the writing speed.   I'm still slower at writing cursive, but I think my writing is more consistent and looks better.  

I'm going to keep at it and see if maybe by the time my children are writing sentences, I might even like the way I write.

The Big Boy Update:  My son got sent to his room today.   He didn't want to go to his room and ended up getting additional time in his room.   This is unusual, usually he is sent until he is ready to do or stop doing the thing there's an issue with.   This works, because if he leaves the room before he's ready, he always gets sent back up.   Today unexpectedly in the car he said, "mommy, you are so stupid."   When we got home he had to go to his room and yelled back at us that we were bad guys multiple times.   Later, when he'd calmed down, I talked to him and asked where he had heard such unkind words (at school) and would he like it if someone told him he was so stupid? (No.)   We'll see what comes home next.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter said, "is it Saturday or Wednesday?"  I told her it was Wednesday.   She said, "oh, I thought it was Saturday."

Fitness Update:   Our trainer had us go outside to do something with a ball, lunges, running at someone and going to one of the streets that was a block or two away.    We never really got what he was talking about so we did something we thought was close for ten minutes and then went back in.