Educating young children to write in cursive? These are the resources for instruction and the way people learn.

Being well-written is not a goal unto itself. Instead, it is a method of achieving literacy that radically alters the human condition. Gaining mastery over the forms of the 26 alphabetic characters will eventually enable one to interact with the realms of reality and fiction as well as the limitless creative possibilities that come with written language.

This is made feasible by legible, fluid handwriting. Most young learners can attain legible handwriting by the end of Grade 2, if they receive targeted instruction and lots of repetition. Similar results can be obtained with fluency with further training and practice.

Proficiency grows gradually

Becoming proficient in handwriting is a gradual, protracted process. It must begin early and align with developmental markers of children’s neuromotor and cognitive readiness to engage with the unfolding demands of handwriting. In turn, there are also demands of generating quality text. Research suggests that a hybrid script, described as a clean, uncluttered manuscript-cursive hand, will most readily develop legibility and fluency. Legibility and fluency of handwriting in turn create neuronal patterns and networks. These support complex processes of organizing, planning, revising and retrieving precise and nuanced vocabulary.

We focus on instructing children in italic printing and cursive or connected script for a variety of reasons: economy of effort, ease of execution and demand on young learners’ musculature and visual motor memory; ease in transitioning from print to cursive hand by learning only a few connector strokes; the elegance and simplicity of the script itself.