Flick and kicks with the letters? Drop line??

[BonkeyMollocks]

Ds is starting school in Sep. We have been to visit the classroom and been told that now children learn to right with the flicks to start with.

I hope you know what I mean, I can't remember the name rightly

I understand that it should be easier to teach children how to join up their writing in future but to me it just seems complicated for little ones to register. I may be wrong they may find it easier

Can someone who has a child who has learnt to write like this come and tell me how they have got on?

Does it confuse them if they see 'normal letters' after?

Reading? Obviously text is in 'normal letters' .

Hmmm...just wondering really, I'm so used to the bog standard way, it looked really odd to me!

Possibly called cursive??
Using the joining line before the letter?

Not sure if I am making sense!

Personally I think they need to learn without the lead in stroke first

mrz Thats what I think, I'm sure I didn't start joining up until I was at least 7. It just looks more complicated to me.

When I was looking at the letters on the board it took me a moment to adjust to the way they were written. They look really different to me, so to a four yo it must be weird.

Ds knows all his letters and can identify his name, but even he said to me they look funny.
I know he will get used to it in time but it just seems un-necessary!

DD is in reception, they started with pre-cursive and went to cursive really quickly. Seems to be a whole school policy as far as I can tell. Doing a flicky bit at the start of a letter at the start of a word seems bonkers to me, but then my primary school did normal writing and italic/calligraphy (old gimmer)

Some of her letters have got noticeably worse IMHO as it is harder to get them the right way round (she reverses more letters now than she did at Christmas)

All 3 of my children have learnt this way and aged 9-17, all have beautiful writing. I think it was more of a problem for us to learn how to write this way as its so different to the way we learnt.

This came on at our school a couple of years ago. Dd1 didn't do it when she was in reception ( y3 now). When dd2 started in 2010 they introduced it and I was sceptical to be honest. Her printed writing was quite good and when she tried to write cursive letters it looked dreadful, I found it almost illegible.

However now she's on year 1 her handwriting is fantastic. Better in many ways than her older sister's.

So from my perspective it appears to be 'a good thing'. According to the teachers they don't tend to get confused with printed text any more than you or I get confused between handwritten text and books/newspapers. They are different things and our brain learns to interpret both.

So what I'm basically saying is seems crazy in short term, but beneficial in long term.