I had the opportunity to review the CursiveLogic Workbook, by CursiveLogic. This curriculum is a cursive program that provides an intelligent new way to teach cursive handwriting.
The inception of Cursive LOGIC was born out of an educator's desire to make learning cursive possible in a short period of time, rather than the tedious rote memorization method currently taught. Why was learning cursive fast so important? Well, while volunteering at a local literacy program the founder of CursiveLogic, Linda Shrewsbury, knew that the adults that she worked with didn't have a lot of time to learn the many skills needed to catch up. After going home and looking at the alphabet for a long time, creator, Linda Shrewsbury, saw a pattern. Each letter of the alphabet seemed to fit into one of four distinct categories or patterns. When Linda went back to explain her newfound method her student was clearly excited. In one lesson, the student was able to form the entire alphabet in cursive, both upper and lower case. The full story can be read here.
Today, the big debate is whether we really need to be teaching children cursive. Well, Linda addresses this on the CursiveLogic site, Why Cursive?
What Linda discovered was truly amazing! Four foundational shapes underlie the ENTIRE lowercase alphabet. CursiveLogic's letter strings teach students to connect letters from the start which allows students instant flow before learning all of the letters.
CursiveLogic Utilizes Two Key Features To Teach Cursive:
- Letters grouped by shape ~ utilizes FOUR groupings
- Letter strings ~ letters in each individual shape group are taught as a connected string in a specific order
Learning the letters by their shapes and not alphabetically made learning cursive much faster than the traditional method. By practicing the letters based on similar patterns, it became a fluid, natural writing stroke. Each of the four letter patterns have a "catch phrase" to help reinforce the how the letters are formed.
At the end of the spiral book, there are two dry eraser marker pages that the child can practice on.
How we used CursiveLogic
To be totally honest, I have kind of put cursive on the back burner with regards to homeschooling. I believe that it is important to learn cursive, but I haven't made it a priority. When I was a child, we were required to learn and then use cursive for years before we were given the choice between printing or cursive. Times have definitely changed. Anyways, I was so happy when I found out that we would be reviewing CursiveLogic.
After looking through the curriculum, I was excited to see this REVOLUTIONARY new way of learning cursive. When I began to explain the process to my children, they were impressed by how easy learning cursive really was. I remember spending my whole 3rd grade school year learning cursive. What took me a whole school year to learn my children will learn in much less time.
My Sixth Grader
My 6th grader caught on very quickly and was so excited. She has used other cursive curriculums but has never mastered cursive writing. She was amazed at how easy it was to learn cursive the CursiveLogic way. She said, "I wish learning everything was this easy." Since learning cursive with CursiveLogic, she has begun using cursive while writing in her journal as well as using it when writing assignments for school. In the above and below picture, my daughter is working on one of the CursiveLogic Practice Pages.
This was the third day after starting CursiveLogic.
One the first day she learned all four patterns.
My Fourth Grader
My 4th grader was not as excited about learning cursive. Her printing is not the greatest and she doesn't enjoy practicing handwriting, so I was not sure how this would go. At first she was very frustrated, not because she didn't understand, but because she doesn't have a lot of patience when learning a new skill. It may take her a bit longer to accomplish writing in cursive, but I can already tell that using this method is going to be my SAVING GRACE. She was so very proud after she successfully learned the Orange Oval Letters. After mastering her first letter grouping she was much more willing to learn the final three. I call CursiveLogic a WIN for both of us!!!!!!!!
After her very first lesson, Lesson 1: Orange Oval Letters, this is what my daughter accomplished.
Her first time trying to write the letters.
Her fourth time trying to write the letters.
Look at the difference!!
If you would like to try a sample of CursiveLogic, click here.
Final Thoughts
I cannot wait to share CursiveLogic with my fellow homeschool friends. This curriculum is definitely the way to learn cursive. At a time when cursive is a dying art, CursiveLogic may just be the ticket to save cursive writing. I would highly recommend this curriculum to fellow educators and homeschoolers. I will definitely be using this curriculum with all of my children both now and in the future.
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