I may be behind the curve on this question, but I’ll throw it out anyway.
My boys are long out of the danger zone of public schooling. I recently heard from a business acquaintance that in addition to drilling on basic sight words, his children were being taught to write without using cursive technique at all.
According to him, all writing in all grades is now done in printed block letters to conform to what they see on the basic word flash cards as well as the “typeface” text on their computer monitors. He further said that he ran into a lot of flack from teachers when he taught his kids cursive at home and they attempted to use it at school.
I’d appreciate any insight you could give me on this matter.
I can tell you there has been a slow war against cursive for many decades. My brother, a lawyer, says secretaries show up looking for work who can only print their names.
Don Potter, a phonics expert, believes that learning to read is much more difficult without cursive.
But here’s the problem for the sight-word gang. Upper and lower case is already a big problem for the kids because “bike” and “BIKE” are quite different, as different as S and $. Then you add handwriting or script, and that’s three versions of each word that the kids have to memorize. It’s quite insane and makes Whole Word even more impossible than it was before. To eliminate this problem, so-called literacy experts quietly tried to drive cursive out of the schools, not because this was a good idea, but to save sight- words!
(Also, I believe, the schools slowly drove second languages out of the early grades, for the same exact reason. All the experts agree that children learn foreign languages most quickly. What do you know? Almost no public school teaches a second language at the elementary level.)
RE: Cursive.
Forgot main point. The oncoming Common Core Curriculum has declared cursive obsolete and a waste of time.
This is just one more reason why everyone should be very suspicious of CCC.