Cursive Level for experienced 5yo?

[tankgirl73]

My daughter is currently 5.5yo and has been working through the Abeka K4 cursive book. Why K4 and not K5? Well, we started when she was 4. We haven't been doing real 'aggressive' schooling while she's so young, just following her interest. Still, we're 2/3 of the way through K4 and I've also purchased their grade 1 book (skipping K5) for when she's done.

She's an advanced reader (almost grade 2 level), and her fine motor skills are very good, but I'd guess that her writing skills are about average for her age. She totally "gets" cursive, though of course sometimes if it's been awhile since we've done anything with her workbook she'll have forgotten the formation of 'p' or whatever, but remembers it again pretty quickly.

This level is mostly tracing, with just a little bit of freeform letters and words - which she's starting to get the hang of. Tracing is easy for her.

I like the look of the NAC books, and she loved the look of the sample pages online. I'm thinking that one route to take might be to do a NAC book after K4, and do the Abeka grade 1 after THAT. I'm not sure, though, whether to do NAC I or NAC II. Since she is already familiar with the letters, perhaps she's ready to go right into NAC II, but I can't tell from the very few sample pages available how quickly it goes away from tracing, for instance, or how much review of letter formation there is.

Any thoughts?

[tanya]

Hello.

NAC1 teaches the letters one by one, along with the connections. NAC2 reviews the letters and connections quickly and then has students writing words that are modeled on the page, but it is freehand writing, not tracing. It looks like 2 letters are reviewed on a page, and then there is a page of random words. The last half of the book is freehand writing where students are asked to come up with their own sentences and then write them in cursive. Also, toward the end of the book, students are only given one line to write on rather than the dotted lines they begin with.

I hope this helps!

Tanya

[tankgirl73]

Thanks, that is helpful. I think we'll try the Abeka grade 1 as planned and see how that goes, and then judge later when the time comes whether she's ready to 'graduate' to less tracing or not and go from there.