For a couple of years, our family used the Prescripts series for penmanship and drawing practice. However, as one of our children progressed from Book 1: Introduction to Cursive Writing & Tracing to Book 2: Writing Cursive Words and Practicing Drawing Skills, we encountered quite a setback. There was such a huge leap from one book to the next, that it was nearly impossible for him to work in the second book!
While he could write his cursive letters separately, he immensely struggled with connecting those letters into words. After attempting a few pages, I knew we’d have to go back and bridge the gap. So… after conducting some research and testing it on more than one child, we recommend using this cursive handwriting workbook to use as a bridge between learning individual letters and connecting those letters into words. Not only did our second son successfully connect letters into simple words using this workbook, but our third son ended up having the same experience! I thought I’d share it here in case anyone else ends up with the same situation.
Since creating this workbook, we’ve developed a more formal curriculum for teaching students how to write in cursive, the Script-n-Scribe Roller Coaster Writer and Script-n-Scribe Letter Connector. Because we wanted to integrate art study and poetry into our school days, we also offer several other poetry & picture study workbooks. Our boys worked alongside me to develop the Script-n-Scribe Cursive Program.
Introduction to Cursive: Roller Coaster Writer (Level 1)
For learning phonograms by sight and dictation and how to form cursive letters. Begins with large motor skills to help young children learn to write. Read more about this product and view additional images and supplemental Montessori-style products here.
Format: Printed, spiral side-bound (85-page) workbook with additional 52 pages of instruction cards printed separately on cardstock (26 cardstock pages printed on both sides). Download sample. Click here for more details.
Note: This resource is eligible for purchase through a charter/public school program.
Suggested grades: Preschool to 3
Printed Book Price: $19.99 (PDF option is also available here.)
Script-n-Scribe™ Letter Connector (Level 2)
Note: This resource is eligible for purchase through a charter/public school program.
Free Copywork and Penmanship Resources
Check out the following copywork integrating poetry & picture study:
- In Flander’s Field Poetry Penmanship
- Landing of the Pilgrims Poetry & Picture Study
- Hats Off! Patriotic Poetry & Picture Study
The Ultimate Guide to Free Copywork This is an incredible list of free copywork pages and resources from across the web.
Make-your-own copywork pages Here you can make your own Print, D’Nealian, or Cursive pages. The following formats are available: name & sentence, single word, multi-word and paragraph. Over the past few years, I’ve used this site to make name practice pages, address-practice pages, and history sentence/timeline/U.S. Presidents copywork pages.
Handwriting worksheets at PrintNPractice
This site offers a massive selection of handwriting and copywork sheets. They also offer math practice sheets, English grammar and diagramming sheets, and spelling sheets/lists. For Pre-K or Kindergarten students learning how to print, the following sheets are some of our favorites and are the ones in our Preschoolers Notebook:
Alphabet worksheets at PrintNPractice
Number worksheets at PrintNPractice
For other notebooking resources, click here.
Free Fonts
To build your own notebooking pages with Microsoft Office, MAC Pages, or another word-processing program, download your preferred font(s) from Fontspace (includes American Sign Language, crosswords, and musical notation) or DAFont. The fonts from these two websites are free downloads, and I have (thus far) had no difficulty in downloading from these sites. (No pop-ups, malware, spyware, etc.)
After downloading the font, you will need to find the Fonts folder on your computer by doing a search using MAC Finder or Windows Explorer and then copying the font file (with extension .ttf) into that folder. For those fonts which do not offer a dashed or dotted option, you can hollow the letters by formatting the font within the word-processing software (select the “outline” option).
Finally, clipart can be downloaded from my favorite educational clipart site, ClipArt ETC from Florida Center for Instructional Technology.
