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I will be doing Little Hands with my 5 1/2 year old son this coming year. He is doing well in reading. He can read simple books and I'm thinking I'll have him start the Emerging readers in the next few months. He does not write much at all though. He can make most of the capitals (I'm not sure they are all made correctly), but he has a hard time with the small curvy lines of the lowercase letters, and even with numbers. Maybe I should have worked with him more on this the past year, but I did his writing for him and even a lot of his cutting and pasting. He can color decently, but again, I usually only had him do this if he felt like it, or I would help him with coloring if he looked discouraged. I am hoping on focusing on fine motor skills in Little Hands and I'm excited about the Rod and Staff books. My question is which handwriting book would be better. Does the K book ever get to writing words or is it individual letters? Do you think the A book would be too hard if he is not writing much right now? Thanks in advance.

We just got the A book and just started it with my daughter who is almost 6 1/2. I would say it sounds like that would be WAY too hard for your son if he is not used to doing much handwriting at all. It starts off with review, so it goes back over all the uppercase and lowercase letters and the numbers, before they get into writing words and copying the Bible verse. But they are doing a whole page of several things on each page, so I think it may be easier to do the K book where I think it focusses more on doing one at a time.

To answer your question, I believe K only focusses on writing the letters and numbers, A is the one that has them copying words and eventually a Bible verse.

Though I would probably more highly recommend the Italic book after seeing both. Italic has fewer practice repeats on each page. I have also done Handwriting without Tears but I think HWT and Italic, at least the books not everything they teach, are very similar. HWT has some other tools for helping children learn letter shapes but I didn't really use those.

Thanks, I'll have to check into the italic books.

They do write words in K, but only one word per lesson. HTH

This is very helpful information! Thanks I will be doing K next year for my son and I was wondering which book to choose as well.