Handwriting
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The traditional handwriting method most of us learned in school is used by A Beka, Concerned Communications (A Reason for Handwriting), School of Tomorrow, Christian Liberty Press, and Alpha Omega, while BJU Press and Rod and Staff offer the slant print method. Rod and Staff prefaces the learning of slant printing with the traditional ball and stick, resulting in a "two-transition" handwriting curriculum—ball and stick to slant print to cursive. A Beka Book offers the option of either manuscript printing or cursive for kindergarten. More publishers using traditional forms have gravitated toward cursive forms that drop the initial loops on upper-case letters (e.g., Zaner-Bloser's method), making them much closer to some of the simplified cursive forms. So some of the distinctions between traditional and simplified cursive styles are not as clear as they used to be.
Traditional Method
- The American Language Series
- A Beka Handwriting Program
- BestEver Handwriting Workbooks
- Blumenfeld’s Alpha-Phonics
- Catholic Heritage Handwriting Series
- Christian Liberty Handwriting
- Copy the Classics
- Crack the Cursive Code
- Cursive Knowledge
- CursiveLogic
- Delightful Handwriting
- Driving Letters
- First Start Reading
- Foundations (Logic of English) Levels A-D
- The Good and the Beautiful Handwriting Series
- Handwriting Skills Simplified
- Horizons Penmanship
- Memoria Press Copybooks
- NotebookingPages.com
- Patriotic Penmanship
- Penmanship (LFBC)
- Peterson Directed Handwriting
- PreScripts Cursive Writing program
- A Reason for Handwriting
- Script-n-Scribe Cursive Courses
- Scripture Scribes
- Spelling You See
- Sprouty Kids Reading
- TeacherFileBox
- Writing Our Catholic Faith Handwriting
- Writing Through History series
Slant Print or Simplified Cursive
- The Aesop for Children: Story and D’Nealian Copywork Books
- BJU Press Handwriting
- Cursive First, An Introduction to Cursive Penmanship
- CursiveLogic
- D'Nealian Handwriting
- Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Series, Books A-G
- Handwriting Without Tears
- Italics: Beautiful Handwriting for Children, second edition
- Learning Language Arts through Literature - The Blue Book
- New American Cursive
- Patriotic Penmanship
- Scripture Scribes
Core Curricula
Featured Slant Print or Simplified Cursive Resource
Handwriting Without Tears
Handwriting Without Tears (HWT) teaches handwriting for children in kindergarten through fourth grade. Some distinctives of this program are: uppercase letters are taught before lowercase groups of letters that have similar strokes or the same starting points are taught together letters are not slanted for either printing or cursive multi-sensory learning methods are used for instruction HWT’s style is simpler than traditional cursive, but it differs from most of the other “simplified cursive” forms in that there is no slant and some of the letters such as “e”, “f”, and “k” change form from printing to cursive.
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