small changes

You know I'm all about changing things as needed or desired. Well, I am making one small change in our curriculum at this point in the year.

Missa has been asking me to teach her to write cursive, but I've put it off because she has TERRIBLE printing and a lot of issues still with reversals in her writing. I had decided that this school year we'd spend one more year working on her printing before we introduce cursive. Then she finally wore me down after watching me make crazy fast notes on paper regarding my college work for a paper I had to do.

Being the always researching person I am, I started looking at different programs for handwriting. We've always used Handwriting Without Tears here, and it has been a great experience for us. It helped a lot to undo the majority of the damage that was caused by half a year that Missa was in our local public schools. Being a lefty in the schools is not a good thing if you don't go into the school already knowing how to write properly. Trust me on this one, I speak from experience as a lefty who went to public school and had a 1st grade teacher try to correct me by rapping my knuckles with a ruler every time I was writing properly (like I had been taught at home) instead of using that incorrect lefty hook to print. Missa came out of school her K year with the hook, and I spent all of 1st grade undoing that and teaching her to properly position herself and the paper for writing before we started tackling the bigger issues of these reversals and incorrect formations over the summer before we started this year, her 2nd grade school year. We've got her printing proper formation about 95% of the time, and have fixed about 75% of her reversal issues in this year and a half that she's been home. Yes, I think she may be almost ready for cursive.

So, in my searching I knew I wanted something different from the program we've always used. Yes, HWT is a wonderful program and saved us with her (and with Liddy's motor delays, she is doing HWT now very slowly and learning to form her lowercase letters now). However, I do not like the style of cursive that this program teaches. So, we change now. I spent a lot of time looking at different programs before finally settling on "A Reason For Handwriting" and purchasing the transition book set from Sonlight. (I have mentioned how much I love sonlight in the past right?) It arrives in the mail tomorrow, and that is when we will get started on it after I take a bit to get familiar with the program.

I chose this program (and Scott just said ok and handed me the debit card to pay) for a couple reasons. One, they use scripture for the handwriting practice lessons. Now, normally I avoid using Scriptures for anything related to schooling my girls so that I do not influence them to only believe one specific thing without giving them an opportunity to question it. However, when it comes to Missa I do not have this worry. She is one of God's little children, and has already decided that when she grows up that she is going to be a missionary and wants to go to different countries and teach people about God and Jesus. So I do not need to worry as much with her on the influence of scriptures in some of her lessons, she already has made her choice obviously. Also, this particular program has "pretty" pages for the final day of the weekly lessons to write the entire verse on, which is supposed to make the child work harder to do their best because it is paper worthy of being displayed. Yes, I will have regular displays of her handwriting pieces in our home I think. But the main reason we chose this program is because of the transition book itself.

The transition book starts with printing, going through the first half of the book only with printing practice before the students begin cursive midway through the book. This is exactly the type of material I needed for Missa, to use as a motivator for her to do well with the print work beforehand. Since we switched programs for cursive, I would have likely purchased a print workbook before the cursive book to go through with her in any other program so that she has the time to adapt to the different program. The transition book has that built in for me already, so I just have to sit with her each day and do the lesson with her and help her adjust to the differences while we work on improving her printing at the same time.

But the book hasn't actually arrived yet, it is scheduled for UPS delivery tomorrow. And knowing how wonderful UPS is in my area, it will be here right around 8am (usually just before that actually) so I will have more than enough time to look it over before we start lessons in the afternoon. I will update how I feel about it when it arrives, and again after a bit of time with the program.