Transitioning to Cursive {TOS Crew Review}

Do you teach cursive in your homeschool?  We recently reviewed a curriculum with the TOS Crew that is helping us with transitioning to cursive in our homeschool.  We are loving Patriotic Penmanship Transition (manuscript to cursive) from Laurelwood Books.

This book which teaches transitioning to cursive does it in a way so your child can not only write in cursive but also read it.  On one page the book has the copywork written in manuscript and on the same page directly underneath it is written in cursive.  This way your child sees the same copywork written both ways and knows what they are writing.  It helps their minds see and learn that the letters are the same.

There is no set grade that this works for.  Of course, your child needs to know how to read to use this book.  I personally used this with my 9 year old son who works at a 4th grade level.  He is one of those children who can write in cursive but couldn’t read what he’d written to me.  This book helped us immensely.  He can now read me what he has written as well as read passages in cursive that might come up in books he’s reading.

This is a trace and write book.  So your student will trace the manuscript, write the manuscript, trace the cursive, write the cursive.  Realistically it’s probably a first to second grade level program, but any grade can use it.  My son who is 9 who has been using this did not do the tracing.  He skipped it unless there was a cursive letter he needed to practice and I asked him to trace it.  

There are 20 lessons in the book.  It’s up to you how quickly you go through it.  Each lesson is two pages long.  You can do one lesson a day, five days a week and be done within a month.  Or you can do one lesson a week and make it last a year.  For the purposes of this review we did a lesson a day four days a week, it is the summer and all you know.  

I think if I were going to use this during the school year I would be doing one lesson a week.  They would do the tracing and writing on day one and on the other four days they would copy the passage once in their very best handwriting in their notebook.  Well copy it twice, once in print and once in cursive.  

Patriotic Penmanship transition retails for $13.95.  They also offer Patriotic Penmanship by grade level from Kindergarten to grade six as well as a book for Junior High and a book for High School students and a cursive review book.  

The author of Patriotic Penmanship and helping us with transitioning to cursive this summer is Mary Ellen Tedrow.  She’s a homeschooling mom of 7 and has been the owner/operator for over 20 years of Laurelwood Books.  She’s definitely got the experience and I for one am grateful she chose to use her experience to help out other homeschool moms.  

With Patriotic Penmanship you’re getting an education in more than just handwriting.  While transitioning to cursive my son was also learning passages.  I love that it’s a more Charlotte Mason approach to handwriting in that the passages are famous quotes, speeches, and passages from the Bible. 

Make sure to head over to the Main TOS blog to see all the wonderful products that our Crew members were allowed to review from Laurelwood Books.  We’re loving our book on transitioning to cursive.  I personally would love to look into more of the Patriotic Penmanship books as well.  You can also find Laurelwood Books on facebook.