Cursive writing in reception

[muttmad]

My daughter (4) is in reception and so far has had a fairly easy ride, she enjoys phonics and basic maths and looked forward to school every day, however they have now started to write the letters and are learning cursive from the start, my poor DD is really struggling, she barely has any pencil control and can’t even draw a recognisable picture yet let alone a legible cursive letter!
She’s gone from a happy, easy going 4 year old who can’t wait to get to school, to a child that cry’s every time we suggest doing her homework or practicing her letters. She’s cried at school and no longer looks forward to going.
She can write the letters in print and has been able to since nursery but this new style is just so alien to her and I’m just so sad for her!
Surely reception should be for a child to develop a life long love of learning, I’m worried this pressure will turn her off learning for good.
When I was a kid we learnt to write joined up at a much older age, and it was fairly easy I just think it’s too much to expect of a 4 year old?

I think cursive is a good skill to learn but a) 4 is too young - it should be taught later and b) it should be taught properly! My daughter always gets good marks for her handwriting BUT IT IS NOT JOINED UP. If you watch her writing, she is very slow as she forms the letters in the wrong direction - but the end result looks perfect. I have asked again and again for the teachers to address this (I do at home but it is not enough) but they are not bothered as the end result is neat and leggible. It means she takes hours to write quite short pieces of text.

I don't think the fact that the OP's daughter's school is teaching cursive is the main issue here. OPs DD's fine motor skills are just not quite developed enough to make a neat job of writing (whatever style).

OP, I'd suggest you have a little chat with the teacher and explain how upset your DD is getting over this. Say you'll try to encourage a little bit of writing practice but only in small doses and you'll stop if she gets upset. Say all the stuff about how you want your DD to enjoy learning, and that this is more important than worrying too much about handwriting in the first term of reception!

Meanwhile, you can do lots of other fun activities to develop fine motor control (playdough, sand, threading beads... someone on here has a lovely long list of ideas).

DS1 did not learn cursive in reception. He then really struggled with the switch to cursive/joined up writing in later years. This put him off writing anything so much that he went from being very capable and enjoying school to finding it a chore and falling behind. It was only a wonderful Y6 teacher who did extra handwriting practice with him for six months that got him writing legibly and fluently again.

DS2, same school, has learned cursive right from the start. He's in Y1 now and his handwriting still varies in size sometimes, doesn't follow the line on the page etc. but all his letters are very well formed and legible. People comment on how nice his writing is and I think he'll find switching to joined up writing pretty simple.

Our school did this too. I thought it was too early.

I got her doing individual letters with "flicks" instead, and explained clearly to the teacher that being expected to join hand was causing my daughter stress, and that we would make the move to full cursive once she was fully comfortable with flick letters and with the basic process of assembling sounds into words. The teacher said OK. We were far from being the only ones to do this.

She moved into actual joined cursive about a year later. I am actually quite glad that they did cursive on the early side because her writing is SO much better than that of her peers who have had different approaches, but I think that flick letters are better until the kids are fluent with the basics.

When DC1 started in reception they had to print, then they learnt to add flicks and finally at some point in Y2 they got onto joined up writing (not specified as cursive, just joined up). He has always had good handwriting, and he's now 12, it's neat, tidy, legible - looks lovely and he can write easily.

DC2 is 3 years younger. In that time, the school decided to switch to learning cursive right from reception. dc2 struggles with fine motor control anyway and struggled right from the beginning. He was used to reading and seeing books with printed words, not cursive, although the school started to print some of their things with a completely illegible cursive font.

So he kind of did printing letters, but added the flicks on and would go back to join up bits that didn't... Then they were telling him that he needed to keep his pen on the paper for the whole word - so instead of being able to to flow through the word as they expect, he prints and keeps his pen on the paper to go around a second time to get the flicks on and then carries on to the next letter... I can't begin to describe how much of a mess it is. I cannot read it. His current teacher (y5) cannot read it although his last teacher could by the end of the year.

It's sad because he's a clever boy, and his writing is worse than his brothers was before he started school. His last 2 teachers used to get him to do letter practice instead of sums or spelling when the rest of the class were doing them in class time because he was so ahead of the class in those - but so behind with his writing but that hasn't happened this year.

I happened to speak to a friend who has similarly aged dc to mine, who went to the same infant school at the same time, and who is a TA at the junior school many of them go on to (albeit mine haven't). She found exactly the same thing happened with her dc - first has beautiful writing, second doesn't. Overall she has noticed that in her eldest's year, there was an even spread from rubbish to beautiful handwriting for dc coming from that infant school. However, for her youngest's year, there's no longer an even spread, but there are two distinct groups. There are some that got on very well with cursive (maybe 2/3s) and have very nice handwriting. The rest really struggled and have rubbish handwriting. There is no longer an even spread of handwriting neatness - those who would have otherwise occupied the middle ground either found themselves doing well and with better handwriting than they would otherwise. Others didn't and had worse - so there was a group of really bad and a group of really good. If you were in the good group - great. If you were in the bad group - it was a double kicker because people just assume you're not trying hard enough because lots of others can do it well - rather than letting them do printing and getting basic but slower legible writing, they're forced to continue with the cursive.

It's another example of discovering a system that worked well for some dc, and then imposing it on all dc, regardless of whether it works for them or not. There is no recognition that just because it works well for a proportion of the population, that they are not all identical and that for those that it does not work well for should try another approach rather than suffering for the rest of their childhood and beyond with bloody awful cursive writing!

(sorry, rant over. as you can see it annoys me a lot!)

Cursive simply means joined.

“he prints and keeps his pen on the paper to go around a second time to get the flicks on and then carries on to the next letter... “ unfortunately it sounds as if he hasn’t been taught how to print his letters correctly in the first place so that they start and finish in the correct place and following the correct direction and sequence of movements. Many children draw the letter shapes and they look right but if you watch how they are formed they are all over the place. Even when printing each letter should be formed without lifting the pencil (exception crossing the t f and dotting i and j and of course x). Starting at the top and curved letters in an anti-clockwise direction (really common for children to start at the bottom and clockwise).
If you get it right at this stage moving to joined is fairly straightforward.

OP, have a look at twinkl and activity village. They have lots of mazes and pencil control sheets which lots of the Children I look after adore. Also encourage drawing and colouring to strengthen her hands.

And Google shonette Bason wood, she does something called dough disco and has a couple of other techniques which will help with gross and fine motor skills.

We had a relaxing reception year and then cursive in yr 1. For DD the goalposts massively changed and her outlook on how to form letters was back to square one. She is now having better success with the strict boundaries of cursive. With youngest I will push cursive from reception so not to confuse her.

NoRest I realise that cursive is joined up handwriting - but certainly within the dcs' schools, it seems to be used now to refer to a specific style of joined up handwriting. It's very different from the joined up writing that I learnt - which is different again from the joined up handwriting of my mother, my father, dh and so on. Even both my grandmothers were taught very different styles of handwriting in the different parts of the country they grew up in - one was copperplate, the other a sort of slate italic (I can't remember exactly what it was called, but it had a definite name). Sorry if I wasn't being specific enough, but I was trying to refer to the very specific style of handwriting that they are taught in school that they call cursive and has very definite ways of doing things - as opposed to all the other joined up writing styles that they could use (and I got told off for showing ds a different way of writing a letter - the way I write it and find much easier - I was told it was wrong and he wasn't allowed to write it like that. It's not wrong. It's just a different style from the one that they prefer - despite the fact that he is unable to write in that style legibly.)

And as for not learning to print properly in Reception - that's my point - he was never allowed to learn to print in reception, it was straight in to cursive writing (unlike his brother 3 years ahead of him). I really believe that if he had learnt to print first he would have significantly better handwriting now than he does. He could print correctly with his letter formations - but because of the way that he had to 'forget' it and do cursive instead, the joining bits became extras he added on and it all just went from bad to worse

That’s the school’s choice of joined style other schools will have their joined-style and they are all cursive. there isn’t a single prescribed way to write that all schools must follow.

Too often handwriting whether print or cursive is left to chance and children basically learn how to copy the shape without knowing where to start or finish so like your son they add bits on or go around and around over and over looking for where to go next. Some schools provide sheets to trace or copy under but no guidance to the child on how!

Just wondered, at those school who teach joined/cursive from the start, how do children link printed letters on the books they are starting to learned to read, to cursive letters they are learning to write?
At this stage of reception, majority of children are just starting to learn to read/ learn letter sound, aren't they?

One of the reasons many EY and reading specialists aren’t in favour of cursive from the start.

I thought learning to write with cursive from the start might be easier than learning to print and change to cursive later when I read this thread.
My ds already new how to print/ recognise letters before school, so it wouldn't have been a problem I think.
But those who are actually learning to recognise letters/ learning letter sound/ totally non reader, isn't this make it even harder to "get it", and make even more gaps between those who are able and those who aren't?

My dcs school decided to start teaching cursive from the start with my dd1s class. It was a disaster. Now in year 2 dd still struggles to form some letters, and whilst she's very slightly ahead with her reading, her writing is awful. She definitely doesn't connect the words she is writing to the words she is reading. The school only did it for one year and have now gone back to starting to teach cursive in year 1. Doesn't help my dd though.