Tuesday, April 14, 2015

New American Cursive by Memoria Press - A Review

Memoria Press Review


In today's world it's becoming increasingly important to support family run businesses.  Personally, I try to go out of my way to support local companies, family businesses, and American made products.  Aside from New American Cursive: Penmanship Program Workbook I being a top notch program for teaching children to write cursive in a fun and easy fashion, Memoria press is a family run business.  For me, that's the icing on the cake!  Memoria Press was founded by Cheryl Lowe and her son Brian in 1998, and in 2000 they opened the Highland Latin School where all of the Memoria Press products are taught and field tested.  Cheryl is an experienced homeschool parent as well as a teacher of many other subjects from phonics to Latin.  Today's Woman magazine even voted Cheryl one of the "Most Admired Women" of 2014.

I've read a lot over the past year about the benefit of cursive handwriting to the development of the young brain.  Learning to write cursive has benefits that reach far beyond the ability to read cursive that naturally accompanies the learning to write process.  It has also been brought to my attention that there could even be benefit to young children to start with cursive right from the beginning as opposed to the standard printing that we seem to teach most often.  Within the New American Cursive workbook it is pointed out that cursive does improve the speed of writing thereby improving the attention span as well as the ability to excel academically.  The mere act of writing in cursive provides an impressive amount of benefits to the young student.

With the above information in mind, I decided to try New American Cursive with all three of our children in mind.  Harmony, the nine-year-old, is our primary focus. She has a strong desire to write in cursive, and we plan to ease into having her submit more and more of her assignments in cursive writing over the next year. Just watching Harmony write in cursive excites the younger two. I let them practice letters separately, but I use the same approach provided withing the New American Cursive workbook. Avery, age 5, enjoys it very much. Bella, age 4, is not quite ready. She can write a few letters, but her attention span for this sort of thing is much more limited. When working with the workbook, Harmony usually spends about 15 minutes per day working on letter and practice pages. Watching Harmony practice her cursive is providing the younger two with a glimpse into cursive writing and all it entails as well as substantiating the information I have been learning in relation to this subject over the past year. I feel encouraged and inspired to teach the younger two cursive right from the start, and they seem eager to learn. Bonus! As far as I am concerned there is everything to gain and nothing to lose.


Memoria Press Review



We will certainly stick with this program for the duration.  New American Cursive is fun and simple which are two very important factors for learning tools making it into our homeschool.  Despite being geared to grade 1 and above, I plan to use this method of teaching cursive with all of my children over the next year. Anything that can span the vast age gap of my children is a top contender for sure.  Talk about a shining star!  With the nine-year-old, I will be following the advice of the program and slowly requiring more and more work submitted in cursive after she's mastered the letter spacing, accuracy, and speed.  This process will surely take longer for the younger two when we incorporate it into their day, but it will occur at a much younger age for them which is totally exciting.  Just think, all that's needed to learn cursive is a workbook for each child and 15 minutes or less per day.  Couldn't be more simple!




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