There are many unexpected moments in the way Montessori presents various concepts of skills to children, including the surprise of introducing children to handwriting first through cursive.
The Sandpaper Letters are
iconic, pink or blue oversized cursive letters in rough sandpaper for a
child to take to a table and practice tracing and pairing with a known
phonetic sound. They’re oversized so it takes a child’s whole arm,
shoulder to fingertip, to trace the sound. Handwriting isn’t just in the
fingers and wrist. With this large dynamic movement, paired with
tactile input from the sandpaper, the visual input from the symbol (the
letter itself), and the auditory input from the phonetic sound this
letter makes (“mmmm” as in “mmmMom”, not “m” as in the delicious
brightly-colored candy) create a strong neural pathway for the child to
attach this shape to the various words they know to include this sound —
math, monkey, music…etc.
Isn’t cursive outdated? Some of us have
negative memories of cursive; as so often emerges in our memories of
education and school, something we have to do instead of something we
get or want to do – worksheets equals frustration with that Capital “G”.
So
why do we introduce this, not just at all, but first, and to such very
young children? There are myriad reasons; and, as is frequently the case
with Montessori philosophy and materials, they’re actually quite
logical.
We
rarely write by hand anymore, but when we do, it’s often some
combination of cursive and print. The letters flow together because it’s
easier and quicker. It is our unique hand writing. Cursive means
“running”, and is simply quicker than picking up and putting down the
pen for each letter.
Visually, in
cursive, all the letters that compose one word are touching, the same
way we say them. This can help when composing lists or moving to
sentences, that different words need a bit of space between them, but
that the letters in one word all touch.
This
also helps when a child starts to move from writing to reading, as
she’ll start to sound out those touching-letters and might surprise
herself when she says a word she recognizes. “That says ‘mom!’ I read!”
Big,
circular, swirly movements are so natural for the young child, and
something they’ve been refining since first coming into the classroom.
Washing dishes and tables, polishing various artifacts, even painting
and coloring, all come in loops and whorls and squiggles. This more
naturally translates to cursive than print letters do. A child’s
creative expression develops into stick figures, houses, and other
identifiable images, but this is more of an elementary stage than these
earliest methods of expression. Concurrently, handwriting that matches
these levels of development is helpful for young children.
In
cursive, every letter starts on the left and ends on the right. It is
very difficult to transpose letters or words, and much simpler to do so
when writing in print. In fact, it’s not uncommon for children
preferring to use their left hand to write away from their body the same
way right-handed writers do and end up transposing letters and words in
the process. Cursive solves this problem.
The
goal is to get a child comfortably using a writing implement. We start
with crayons and paint brushes in art, scrubbing brushes in Practical
Life, and grow into more precise, purposeful movement with materials
like the Metal Insets, where a child carefully traces and fills in a
geometric shape, exercising a great deal of self-control to not end up
scribbling.
Cursive
does this. For all the developmental reasons we’ve uncovered, cursive
is a more available method of handwriting for the very young child than
print is. And, once you’re writing, you’re off! Comfort with re-creating
letter shapes using a pen or pencil isn’t limited to cursive; once you
can write in cursive, it’s just nuance to change to print, or
calligraphy, or Cyrillic, or Japanese characters, or Thai or Arabic
script.
Writing is another language, another method of expression, and cursive helps children run.