Huh, I didn't realize that teaching cursive wasn't pretty much universal. They start it in 3rd grade here.

sara - insent to gmail.

Weirdly, I volunteered in Sara's kindergarten class this morning, and one of the little girls wrote her name in cursive on her paper. Her name is Samantha, too.

In PA, my kids learned the D'Nealian method from kindergarten on, which is supposed to make cursive easier, but they don't use it here.

Of course, these people are SUPPOSED to be printing, but people often don't. But the fact that the under 25 set has read a lot less handwriting in general didn't really occur to me, and sort of explains some things!

I am not sure if they teachit here or not, but mac went through a phase where he was desperate to be taught. His grandma did some teaching with him on the strict rule that it could not be used in school yet. He practiced for a while, but then he dropped it.

I know some schools have dropped handwriting all together since so many kids do papers and reports on the computer from a very early age. And then the fact that standardized tests through grade school do not require it. If it is not tested on, there will be calls to drop it.

48F10172A is a reference to a TV show.

It's bizarre to me because in France they don't learn printing. Obviously you do it on forms, but they don't teach it as a first step to writing.

And then the fact that standardized tests through grade school do not require it. If it is not tested on, there will be calls to drop it.

I could understand that. Here, there is pretty much a month and a half of school year given over to the high stakes tests and preparing for them.

At Nate's school they're starting to progress into typing/printing their papers out. He actually has dispensation to do this for all his written work because he has processing issues. He has horrible handwriting and it's just difficult for him. I don't think he'll ever have particularly good handwriting unless he decides at some point to really apply himself to learning.

I learned cursive, but was never very good at it, and it never felt natural. In elementary school, teachers required that we write things in cursive, but as soon as they stopped requiring that, I went back to writing in print.