Saturday, July 6, 2013

Review - CC Prescripts: Cursive Words and Drawing

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For obvious reasons, I was pumped to get to review the newest offerings from Classical Conversations:  PreScripts Cursive Words and Drawing with Princess P. I looked them over at our CC Practicum last month, and liked what I saw, but wondered how it would go in reality. They have four different books in the series; this one is recommended for ages 5-10.

I love this quote from the note to parents in the beginning of the book: "Just as we learn to speak by mimicking our parents' words, we can learn to write well by copying the words that others have written."

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This 2nd book in the PreScripts series assumes you know basically how to form your cursive letters. If you don't, you might want to start with their first book: PreScripts Cursive Letters and Coloring (for ages 3-7). P has taught herself most of the cursive letters but I haven't been good about keeping up with her handwriting curriculum in the past. She hates writing the same letter over and over for pages at a time, so I haven't pushed it.

I thought she might be annoyed by the spiral at the bottom of the page, but she never mentioned it, so I didn't either. :)

The book begins having them write all the letters one time, capital and lowercase, then starts taking them letter by letter. Each letter has its own page and its own Bible verse. So for "Aa" day, P wrote the letter "a" a few times, then "All" a few times, then Romans 3:23, which says, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Now, I'll be honest, she can't even read all those words in cursive yet, which was frustrating her at first. I would go over them with her and told her to just trust the system (something I've learned being in CC for 4 years already!). She traced the verse and wrote the verse on her own. After each letter page, there is a drawing page. These were big pulls for her since she loves to draw. "If you finish your writing, you can do the drawing." Bribe. Pull. Call it what you will. It helps get the job done so I like it! It only takes about 15 minutes a day for her to do the lesson, and then however long she wants to do the drawing. Sometimes she takes her time and draws a lot and sometimes, like in the picture shown here, she did the bare minimum and called it done. Either way is fine with me!

For the drawing part, they start out learning all the simple shapes (that match up with what we do the first 6 weeks of CC!) and then start putting those shapes together to make different pictures. As we went on through the book, she stopped complaining about not knowing what to do, and started just doing it. I love that she is writing scripture and learning as she goes. After we finished the letters, we moved on to writing numbers, and are looking forward to the "tricky letter combinations" that are coming up soon using James chapter 1.

She is enjoying this book and her writing it definitely getting neater. So glad I trusted the program. ;) I plan to keep working through this book the rest of the summer. There are enough pages to use for an entire school year if you use one a day. P is doing 2+ a day so I'm planning to finish it earlier. I liked it so much that I bought two of the next book in the series, for both P and T. It is called Prescripts Cursive Sentences and Art Lessons (for ages 7-12). I like that it has all their history sentences for Cycle 2 in it so we will do it on the weeks we are in CC, and continue with this original one for P on the off weeks when we don't have new history sentences.

The books are $12.99 each and nice, spiral bound books. I'm thankful we were able to review this and excited to continue to see improvement in her penmanship.


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