A Cursive Writing Program – Thinking Instructional Design Part 1 of a Series - A Cursive Writing Program for Students Bradley’s Story – Thinking Instructional Design First Bradley arrived at Quinte Learning Centre in Belleville, Ontario as an 11-year old who had been attending local public schools since Kindergarten. Bradley could not read, nor count from 10 to 20. He had language deficits and could not write or spell his first or last name. We started his program with language, reading, counting and digit writing. Bradley was always cooperative and worked hard. Our top priority was to teach Brad to read using Zig Engelmannâs Level 1B Corrective Reading (decoding) program with Ogden Lindsley’s daily Precision Teaching charting. In September, Brad could only read 30 words per minute with 12 errors per minute. He made consistent progress until, in November, he read 150 words per minute with only 3 error. He continued making gains on each story until he was fluent all 150 words read correctly with 2 or fewer errors on all 60 stories. His digit writing of letters and numbers improved with daily practice until he could correctly write 125 digits or letters. Unfortunately, Bradley’ss father was laid off and the family moved away before we could finish our work. See / Say Cursive Writing Skills Want to solve problems before they start? Think Instructional Design before anything! Most people pay scant attention to cursive writing skills, but they can be a major barrier to completing written tasks, especially for children in elementary classrooms. Students are forced to rely on their printing skills when cursive is not carefully taught. Generally, in elementary schools today, there is little formal instruction as to how one creates letters or numbers and even less supervised practice. As a result, many students have time-consuming cursive writing skills and write only when absolutely necessary. Correction Procedures for a Cursive Writing Program = Thinking Instructional Design There are a number of common errors, such as students writing numbers from the bottom up instead of from the top down. These patterns are generally ignored, with the result that the students remain slow numeral writers. The teaching of writing skills has numerous component skills which make up the composite behaviour. Each of these component skills can be measured and taught if necessary. The presentation of the scope and sequence of letters and numbers in cursive writing requires further instructional design. Before that design is attempted, we need to rank the order of the tasks we want to teach students. The list is outlined below: Pencil grip Hand movement Individual cursive letters Printed numerals Cursive script tool skills – different exercises to get the student’s hand moving and making specific cursive marks (e.g. scalloped lines, ttttts, mmmmms, wwwwws, oooooos, etc.) Cursive letters I have outlined a number of tool skills to be considered with the student’s cursive writing development. Further Recommendations Elizabeth Haughton and Jonathan Amey have done more work in cursive writing programs for students than I have. Anne Desjardins’ “Big Six” the early work with Anne and Eric Haughton, is also something you should learn about, and start with effective instruction design. Bonus: Check out the FREE lessons of the Maloney Method Digital Reading Program. If you can read, you can teach a child to read. CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR DIGITAL LEARNING WITH VIDEO LESSONS AND THE MALONEY METHOD
