Cursive First -- Update
This is a sample of Jerry's first copy work. We spent two weeks learning the lower case letters. This is a boy who hated penmanship before. It was like pulling teeth to teach him how to print correctly. Now he can write in cursive and even his printing is improving. Now learning the uppercase letters is almost natural. Just today he learned, J, R, F, T, A, and G.
The Cursive First program teaches the letters in groups, the clockface letters, the loop letters, the uphill letter, and the bump letters. As Jerry learned each letter he would say the various strokes out loud. So he is learning by doing, hearing, and saying, each letter. For a hands-on kinda kid, that's great!
Cursive first is designed to work with a phonetic learning to read program. Now that he knows his basic letter formation, he practices writing the different phonograms (letters ad letter combinations that make one sound ie. "sh") that make up the English language. This is helping with his reading. Instead of sounding out a bunch of letters he is learning to read by phonetic sounds.
For more information on why teaching cursive first is such a great idea go to: Cursive First: An Introduction to Cursive Penmanship. It only costs $20 and is fully reproducible. If we hadn't already been given a phonics based reading program, I would consider buying the companion program, "Spell to Read and Write." Jerry is very proud of the fact that his writing is better than his Daddy's, but then again even Daddy has trouble reading his own writing :)
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2 comments:
This sounds very much like Recipe for reading that we use for learning to read.
Jerry's doing great!
By the way...friends of ours will be visiting you...the Loewen family, to present their ministry...and I think you just had the Newmans there...aren't they a blessing!?
Great Job, Jerry! Keep up the good work:))
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