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I am anticipating my box of Preparing materials this week. I want to get started right away. I was looking at the sample week for Preparing, and science on day 1 has the child copying a Scripture verse in cursive in their notebook. Angie has learned all of her cursive lower-case letters. we are currently on the capitals. Should I just have her do the verse in manuscript, or would it be okay to have her do it in cursive, just making the capitals in manuscript if she doesn't know the cursive. We got a little behind on the cursive while doing Barton, so I'm trying to finish Cheerful Cursive this year. She enjoys doing cursive. So, the practice would be good for her. Hopefully the capitals will be mastered by the end of this school year.

I wouldn't have her do the capitals in manuscript and the rest in cursive because I think that could confuse her and it is an error that many kids with dysgraphia tend to do and you don't want to train her that way. I would have her do the copywork in manuscript until she is ready for doing it all in cursive. Also I wrote any copywork in cursive on our white board for my ds to copy. That seemed to really help with his formation of the letters.

Thanks Lynn. I was thinking that I should probably give her more time to learn cursive. I used to always put her copywork on a board for her to follow when she was doing manuscript. I definitely would do that for cursive. If she does it in manuscript now, it will be good for her to have the practice writing it directly from the Bible. I think she can handle that. Since her eye surgery, her tracking is so much better. So, manuscript it will be.

Great advice from LynnH already! I'll just add that if it gets to the point you think she is ready to do cursive copywork and capitals are slightly the problem, you can always lightly write the capitals for her and have her trace them. She can write the lowercase on her own. For some reason, Wyatt struggled repeatedly with some capital letters (especially "J"), and me writing them and him tracing them helped.

In Christ,
Julie

Thanks for the advice, Julie. I will wait a little while to have her do the copywork in cursive, since she has formally only practiced 5 capitals so far. I will keep that in mind in the coming months.