Cursive

At Petra, the kids learn to write in cursive first. When I first heard that, I was surprised. Back in my day, we learned print first, and then cursive in 3rd grade. As Eliana's kindergarten teacher explained it, by learning cursive first, the kids grasp the idea of word spacing better (since each word is connected, then a space separates the words from each other) and letter reversals are greatly reduced (since b,d,p, and q don't look as similar in cursive, and they all have leading edges and connectors that keep them going the right way). Even understanding the reason behind it, I wasn't sure how easy it was going to be for Eliana to learn, especially since she had already learned print. It turns out, though, that she's doing okay with it.

So far she has learned the letters a,c,d,g,o, and t. It's fun to listen to her recite how to make the letters as she writes. It goes something like this... "Upward stroke, stop at the 2, clock face stroke, add a connector." - That's an a. For c, she says, "Upward stroke, stop at the 2, clock face stroke, stop at the 5, add a connector." And for g she says, "Upward stroke, stop at the 2, clock face stroke, go straight down, backwards loop, add a connector."

In class, I believe they are working on writing the letters and learning the sounds each letter makes. Tonight, however, when I asked Eliana to show Leif what she'd been learning at school, she had no problem putting the letters together to form words. Here are the 3 she wrote when Leif asked her to...

From Instant Upload

And, yes, she did add smiley faces to each of the letters in dog. I'm pretty sure that was her own bit of pizzazz, not something they taught her in school. Still, not bad for the second week of kindergarten, eh?