Rhythm of Handwriting Cursive Book (2nd Edition)

I wouldn’t buy this for my next child. I like that there’s a specific number of spaces for them to write letters. My child thinks it’s just this huge page. Maybe til the year is over I will understand why others gave it good reviews.

This is my favorite cursive program. I appreciate that it is one of the few cursive programs that still teaches the capital Q to look like a 2, which is how I was taught in school and how many older generations still write. I also teach my child the “new” cursive Q, that basically looks like a Q, but I like them to know both. This is a straight-forward program. All pages are black and white, with lots of room for practice in different sizes. It has lots of review. Overall, I like this program the best for cursive because it’s not overwhelming, simple, and effective.

This workbook makes teaching cursive easy. It presents the letters in groups based on the strokes used when forming the letters (so not alphabetically). It encourages saying the strokes as they are written. It also advises teaching cursive before print.

I’ve used this book this year 2019-2020 to teach my 1st grader how to write cursive. She finds it very difficult to form the letters correctly since there are no traceable letters. All they give is one example letter in each size and she has to try to write the letter correctly by only looking at their letter. This only works if you are standing over them the entire time making sure that they are really forming the letters correctly. If I leave my daughter for even a minute I come back to find that she has started forming the letters in whatever way she likes. Since there was no traceable letters to trace, she hasn’t built the muscle memory to form them correctly before she’s on her own. I ended up having to write lines and lines of letters out myself in soft pencil for her to trace. I mean, if I stood there and gave the verbal directions every time she wrote the letter it was ok, but who has time to do that? Another problem I had with this book is that the verbal directions for writing each letter were on different pages from the practice pages, which meant I had to keep flipping back and forth to give the right verbal directions, or I had to memorize them all, or I had to write them out myself on each page. This book is not teach at home friendly.

Love their approach to cursive writing. We tried so many different cursive writing books to no avail. My daughter had trouble forming some letters and connecting them to write words. This books breaks the letter by categories and each category has special marks or characters associated with how to create various parts of that letter such as a roll or curve for letter a. But what I think helps too is they actually help the children see the paper as divided into parts topline, midline, and baseline which helps them to write neatly as they take in boundaries of those line. Kids also repeat the little sayings when writing the letter so it sticks example for letter i swing up to the midline, down to the baseline, pick up your pencil and dot.. My daughter is now so excited that she can write cursive with ease and stress free.