Boys and Handwriting

Several years ago, when Dirty Harry was just beginning his homeschooling adventures, I attended a day-long conference on homeschooling.  I remember exactly three things about this conference.

First, I remember that the speaker asked a mom sitting near the front to please remove her toddler child from the room because his activity was distracting her.

Secondly, I remember the speaker recommending this book…

And then I remember buying it from her booth at the close of the conference, and I remember loving every moment of reading it.  Seriously, if you haven’t read The Hawk and the Dove  trilogy by Penelope Wilcock, you need to consider remedying that.  It’s so totally good!

Lastly, I remember her comments and suggestions about teaching handwriting to boys.

The sanctuary of the church where we were meeting was pretty full.  I’d say there was somewhere between 200-300 people in there.  We were mostly women.  The speaker asked us to raise our hands if we regularly wrote in cursive.  Almost all of us raised our hands.  Then she asked us to raise our hands if our husbands regularly wrote in cursive.  I’d say roughly about 10% of the women raised their hands.  She then went on to give an explanation of why that was.

Cursive is generally introduced in public and private schools in the second grade.  The instruction continues into the third grade, and by about halfway through that year, the child is expected to have it mastered, and cursive writing is required for written assignments from then until usually late middle school or high school.  By then most kids have access to computers and typewritten assignments are accepted and encouraged.

This timeline is usually fine for girls.  Girls are ready to trade in their sturdy block print and No. 2 pencils for purple gel pens and flowery signatures accented with hearts and butterflies.  Boys, usually, are not.  The speaker explained that there is a tiny muscle in a child’s hand that everyone needs to be fully developed in order to have success with handwriting and other fine motor skills.  This muscle develops earlier in girls, usually by the age of 7 or 8.  For boys, it develops fully later.  So, boys as a whole, will struggle with the skills they need for cursive writing simply because their hands and fingers aren’t ready for it.  If they could wait to learn cursive until 3rd or even 4th grade, they would have much more success and less frustration.

I was one of the women at that conference who kept my hand down when asked if my husband wrote in cursive.  Big D does not.  As a child, he struggled with it and hated it.  As soon as he was allowed to go back to printing he did.  Today he writes like this…

At times when he has a lot of writing to do, the large block letters get more and more undiscernible.  Big D’s signature is…ironically…a D, a big one. (…and that list is excercises that he was teaching to Dirty Harry’s baseball team, just in case you were wondering.)

I waited until this year, 4th grade, to start cursive for Dirty Harry, and it’s gone off without a hitch.

No complaints.  No fussing.  And believe it or not, he actually writes in cursive better than he prints….even if he didn’t dot any of the i’s in Philippians.  There are quite a few acceptable handwriting programs out there.  We used this one…

They have a transitional book, pictured above, that slowly and methodically introduces a child to cursive.  You can purchase it here.

Is cursive writing even necessary anymore?  I guess one could argue that it is not with computers being available to kids so prevalently.  Yet it was important to me that my children still learn it.  Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t let them do all their assignments on a keyboard.  Both of my older ones have taken pride in the accomplishment of learning cursive, and I’m sure I’ll continue the tradition with Cap’n Jack Henry in several years.

So, if you have a little guy coming along, you might want to save all those swirls and loops for a year or two longer and let that tiny, necessary, small motor skills muscle develop fully.  And I’m pretty sure he won’t need a purple gel pen either.