TOS Homeschool Crew: Peterson Directed Handwriting Review

Ausonie first expressed an interest in learning cursive writing about a year and a half ago. She began using the workbook that I chose with great enthusiasm, but she lost interest about midway through it.  Then she grumbled through the rest of the book and in the end said she'd rather write in script.  While developmentally she was too young for the fine motor skills to find this easy and progress quickly, she put in a good effort, as kids always do when something is their idea.

When I received the three e-workbooks from Peterson Directed Handwriting, I didn't know how she would receive another attempt to learn cursive.  The first e-book starts with the very beginning:  how to hold your pencil, how to position your paper.  There are also some guidelines for parents to initiate the little ones in hand writing:  start with air writing, practice exercises, and work from there.  I am not sure how helpful these would be when starting off, because we were already past this point.  I tend to think this complicates things a bit, when simply having the child trace a letter, then copy it, worked fine for us.

Now here is a little background.  I grew up in Romania, where cursive writing is (or was, at that time), the only type of writing taught in school.  Towards highschool, we were allowed to start writing in print, but by that time we had to write so much and so fast, that nobody really used print on a usual basis.  While this might seem extreme to Americans, it was NOT as ornate as the letters in this program are, and not slanted as much either.  I have no other cursive writing material to compare it to, but to me it looks unneccessarily complicated.  Sure, after one masters the basics, there is plenty of time for such embroidery on paper, but I think starting off this way might be too much for some kids, especially since some loops and twists make the actual letter less recognizable.

First Ausonie flatly said no.  When I suggested to try just a few pages and see how it goes, she reluctantly agreed, and once she saw how easy it came to her, she was excited to go on.  And on.  To the point where she did the whole first e-book in just 2 days.  She was not interested in the 'learning' pages, which introduce each letter together with pictures of related words.  Instead of printing the pages, I either wrote the letter at the beginning of a line in her copybook and she copied it for the rest of the line.  We did not use this method as it was intended, as some of the things it teaches seem counterintuitive to me, such as having this child chant as she writes: 'sharp top - loop top - tail - rock'.  That was hard to do even for me!

The second e-book progresses to copywork of full words, making use of the letters already learnt.  This was of some use to us, before progressing to doing the usual daily writing in cursive instead of print.  She now writes her to-do list in cursive :)  I skimmed through the third e-book, which is another workbook version, and it re-introduces the strokes, the letters, and goes on to words and texts to copy.  We actually did not need this one, as by the end of the second book Ausonie started writing beautifully.  Each e-workbook sells for $19.95.  The company webside had a few nice surprises:  I really liked their animated letters and wall cards. 

While we had to tweek this program quite a bit, it actually DID make Ausonie want to use cursive now!  I believe this was partly because she had already been introduced to cursive and felt comfortable doing it, and partly because she is attracted to anything on the computer screen like a moth to light :)  Since good came out of it, the opportunity to use this program was a positive experience.  Thank you, Peterson Directed Handwriting.

This product was given to me free of charge for the purpose of this review.  The opinions listed here are strictly my own.  If you'd like to see what my crew mates thought of it, click here.