I’m frequently amazed at how much life has changed since I was a little girl. Back in the 1980’s and 1990’s, having legible handwriting seemed to me to be a necessity for school because if my teachers couldn’t read your work, they wouldn’t grade it. (I recently found our school’s standardized exam prep handout: “Handwriting counts . . . . If the readers cannot decipher your [essay] answer, they will not grade it.”)
My kids’ world is a totally different place. Both of my kids have iPads and laptops. My daughter writes her stories in LibreOffice. She has a science notebook that she has created using Goodnotes and draws in with a stylus. She journals in the Diarly app. I do not advocate pushing five-paragraph essays on kids until high school, so we have not done any standardized writing assessments.
To be candid, I really don’t know how much writing my kids will actually be doing as adults. So my current objectives for handwriting in our homeschool are these:
- To make sure that my kids can legibly complete forms–like the vaccination form at the pharmacy each year.
- To make sure my kids can legibly write essays for any assessments they must take in the future. (See my standardized exam handout story above.)
- To make sure that my kids can sign their full names in cursive.
- To make sure my kids’ writing is legible enough to be converted on their iPads–specifically in Apple Notes and in Goodnotes.
At any rate, my older child’s writing practice every week is to copy a literary quotation or a poem in both manuscript and cursive. She does so on paper and on her iPad. Afterward, she converts her iPad writing into text to check readability.
These are the quotations we’ve used so far.
- “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” John Steinbeck, East of Eden
- “I’m so glad we live in a world where there are Octobers!” L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
- “Call me Ishmael.” Herman Melville, Moby Dick
- “I can’t believe what you say because I believe what you do.” James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory”
- “‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the cat.” Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
- “It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
- “All I want is a dress with puffy sleeves!” L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
- “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
- “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
These are the poems she has copied so far.
- “The Elephant in the Room” by Kay Ryan
- “The Riddle of Strider” by J.R.R. Tolkien
- “Reply” by Florence (Flossie) Williams
- “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams
- “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver
- Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”) by William Shakespeare
- Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”) by William Shakespeare
- “Christmas Bells” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- The opening sonnet of Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare
I’ll note here that my daughter–for now–wants to be a writer and intends to major in English in college, so she does not mind these excerpts. Before these, she copied George Washington’s Rules of Civility, one per week. She did not care for those, but we finished them just to encourage completion of endeavors. I don’t think I would continue with them today, but my homeschooling has evolved. I don’t currently intend to have my son do either of these copy work assignments because these will not interest him. I cannot emphasize enough that our homeschooling is largely child-led. Indeed, on the day I drafted this post, I found this note I wrote for myself in a tracing book filled with silly sentences.
I stopped focusing on little details and just let her work on writing. She did not care for this book–neither did I–and finishing it was a struggle for both of us. We’ll work on perfecting writing with our next handwriting adventure.
Side note: I’ve since internalized that perfection isn’t attainable. (See John Steinbeck quotation above.) If you haven’t already done so, you should do that, too.
How did I actually teach handwriting? For one thing, I didn’t force it. I waited until my kids showed interest in writing. My son showed early signs of dysgraphia, and I really feared he would never write well, but my fears were unfounded. I let him write on anchor chart notebooks and chalkboards (IKEA has a great one if you can’t or don’t want to build one on your wall) and butcher block paper (again, see IKEA rolls) because I wanted him to write on different surfaces. We really focused on gross and fine motor skills and on playing outside on our swing set and jungle gym. I modeled handwriting: I wrote a lot myself in notebooks, and I wrote notes and cards by hand. I provided reams of paper as well as lots of pencils and color pencils and markers, and just after he turned six years old, he picked up the pencils and started writing on his own on a daily basis; only then did I start working with him on letter formation using a tracing pad, special paper, and tracing books.
New homeschoolers frequently ask me about a handwriting curriculum. My daughter used Handwriting Without Tears for about two years. She tolerated it well at the beginning, but I made this note in my school year evaluation the second year.
I stopped HWOT after the emphasis on language arts started. I found my child to have too much focus on the language arts and not enough on handwriting form. Also, I don’t want to have to grade anything other than form. I hated that her focus on handwriting went downhill when HWOT started incorporating language arts lessons, so we quit using the book entirely.
My daughter loved joke books, so I then bought her a tracing book of jokes. My notes on that book are as follows.
I wish I’d never used the cursive joke book because the traditional cursive in that book differs from the cursive writing learned in Handwriting without Tears.
That note leads me to an important point: Different texts teach cursive in different ways. My elementary school had a single uniform way of teaching cursive writing, and all students were expected to form letters the same way. We all adapted our cursive handwriting as we grew older, though, right? I got caught up in wanting my older child to write cursive letters one specific way, and I think that was a mistake. When I do cursive again with my son, I’ll let him review samples/fonts and let him pick which one he likes best.
I may still use Handwriting Without Tears for manuscript for my son, however. We are still working in other tracing books and pre-writing activities.
Both of my kids tried the Writey app for a year. My daughter felt that the app helped her, but my son, who wasn’t writing on his own at all at that time, did not like the app much. That said, I think writing with a pencil on actual paper is preferable for beginning writers.
One more thing: My son had the hardest time with grip. This video about Ally the Alligator helped a lot.
Final note: Kids are tiny humans. Humans are individuals. Your mileage will–and should!–always vary! Do what works best for your child. That’s the beauty of homeschooling.
Never stop learning,
Erin
