Daily Quote

I feel a little lukewarm about the importance of cursive. I rarely use it and Jacob hasn't used it since elementary school. I can't think of many pros to teaching it other than I want her to be able to read other people's handwriting. 

Benefits or no, since September, Casia and I usually start our school day with a daily quote. I use online sources to find interesting lines on such topics as leadership, effort, education and following your dreams. This started as a handwriting exercise where I read a few sentences aloud and Casia writes them down, in cursive. The daily quotes are also good listening exercises. Casia tries to correctly spell and punctuate the sentences as well and we then discuss the meaning. So though I'm only so-so on the advantages of cursive, I've been finding many benefits with the daily exercise. Her cursive has now improved to the point at which I'm willing to say, she knows enough, now let's move on. 

Since the fall, Casia has been using a Mavis Beacon computer program to teach her typing. It took her several months to learn the locations of all the letters and punctuations, but she can now touch type, at the speed of about nine words per minute. But it's a start! So I've switched from having her write the daily quote in cursive to having her type it. It's going well so far. We're only doing one or two sentence quotes but I would like to move up to paragraphs as her speed improves.

In addition, I started Garrett on this activity (although he prints instead of writing in cursive or typing), at his request, several weeks ago and he has stuck with it. In fact, he really likes it and works very hard at improving his printing. It's a great way to start the school day because they both genuinely enjoy the activity, especially getting to do it together.