Introducing: The Cursive Project

Trevor will be entering third grade in 6 weeks, the year students in California traditionally learn cursive. With the adoption of Common Core, cursive won't necessarily be taught in school anymore. (Note that Common Core does not require forbid the teaching of cursive. Instead, it doesn't require it. Big difference.) I'm not freaking out about this. I'm not one of those people who thinks civilization is going to crumble because our kids aren't learning cursive.

Trevor wants to learn cursive. Since he may not learn it in school, I'm choosing to teach him at home over the summer. (If it is taught at school, he'll be a step ahead. Nothing wrong with that.) During the month of July, we'll be doing The Cursive Project together. Each day, he'll learn one letter in cursive, then we'll do an art project that corresponds to that letter. By formalizing it and turning it into a project that we'll do every day, it will keep us both on track and excited about it.

I started by having him think of something that starts with each letter from A-Z that we have never made together before. While he was doing that, I prepped worksheets for each letter.

Then we went over his list together and talked about what materials we'd use for our first few projects. Once those were planned, we were ready for A.

He was so excited to finally learn cursive! He did very well for his first attempt.

As you can see, I kept the work extremely brief. Learning isn't fun for him (or anyone) if it's repetitive and tedious. After tracing my sample letters on the first row, he tried them on his own. Then he did a row of capitals and a row of lowercase. Then he connected Aa and finally aa. (Once we've gone all the way through the alphabet, he'll come back and write a sentence about his art project on the last three lines.) He was so proud of his first cursive writing!

Next, we moved on to our craft, a tissue paper apple. We gathered our materials: watercolor paper, paint brushes, tissue paper (red, yellow and two different greens), and Sta-Flo liquid starch. I've blogged about my love of crafting with liquid starch many times.  If you're not familiar with it, read this post.

Tear the tissue paper into small strips. Using the paintbrush, moisten the paper with a little bit of undiluted starch, then place a piece of tissue paper on it.  Paint over the top with more starch.  

Layer the colors and overlap the strips to add interest. I chose to make two apples (one red and one green). My paper looked like this when I was done.  

Let the paper dry completely, then cut out your apple shape. We each did a quick sketch on the back of our paper, then held it up to the window to be sure that we were happy with the placement and colors.

Cut out the apple, then use scraps to make a stem and leaves. Here's Trevor's apple:

These are mine:

The Cursive Project is off to a great start!