Hey teacher friends!
When did you learn to write in cursive? I remember moving from Georgia to Cincinnati, Ohio at the beginning of 3rd grade and realizing that everyone already knew how to write in cursive- except for me! Eeeee. I went home crying and my mom talked with my teacher and I got extra help so I could catch up to everybody else. But now cursive is not really part of our school’s curriculum. There’s too many other things to worry about and cursive just gets swept under the rug.
Or maybe you’re like me and you just send home cursive pages once a week for homework/ practice.
How important is cursive? What’s important about cursive? Should we be teaching it? Or should we just be teaching how to read it and sign a name? I never know. So it gets put on the back burner. But that’s SO not good either.
So this week I decided to step up the emphasis on cursive. I wasn’t really sure what direction to take. But I thought about what’s most important these days. I think kids should still learn to write in cursive, but it’s not as important for them to write in it all the time. Instead, I feel like they should know how to sign their name and they should be comfortable reading cursive. If they decide to learn how to write it, that’s great, but it’s their own choice! So to emphasize the importance of reading cursive, I’ve started writing my morning messages in cursive. Yikes- that’s even hard for me to do!
I already see some improvement in their knowledge of reading cursive! Students that asked me questions at the beginning of the week are no longer asking questions and are getting their morning work finished! We’ll see how this goes, but I’m hoping it will at least prep them for the middle school years coming up! What types of things are you doing? Any thoughts on how to make cursive even better? I look forward to hear what other teachers out there are doing!
Thanks!
