I know I’ve been gone a long time! Writing posts seems to take so much more effort than sharing photos on instagram! And then we made a sudden, mid-holiday decision to sell our little house and buy another house with more space. It’s an understatement to say this last month has been crazy!

We have done zero homeschooling since Thanksgiving and just moved into our new home on Friday. It’s incredible and amazing and there is still a lot of work to do. But, our break from school has been long enough, so we started up again this morning.

We started with a new cursive writing book. Danny had finished the review section of New American Cursive (NAC) Book 2, but I didn’t like that they only use a single guideline for the rest of the book. Then I found Scholastic’s Cursive Writing Practice, Jokes & Riddles and I knew it would be perfect for Danny. It doesn’t teach how to write in cursive, so a starter book like NAC Book 1 is still necessary, but it is great for fun practice at Danny’s level.

While Danny was writing, he asked me to sit with him. He wrote the practice words fairly quickly, then began to write the first of two practice sentences. After just a few words, he paused and noticed the page said “Practice Page 1” in the upper right corner.

He sighed and said, “I’m only on the first page and I’m already struggling”. So I stopped his lesson and we talked about what kinds of lessons are good to do in school. I said it wouldn’t make sense to give him an assignment on how to count to 5, because he already knows how to do that! He uses numbers all the time, but doesn’t need to study counting to 5. That would be too easy.

Then I asked him what he would think if I told him to write a poem in calligraphy or do a physics experiment. He looked at me with big eyes. He’s never done anything like that! He agreed it would be silly to expect him to do those things in school right now.

Then we looked at his lesson again. I pointed out that the letters are written in cursive and he knows how to do that. That the words are simple and he’s able to read them fairly easily. But that the challenge of this lesson was to practice writing longer words (like homework) and full sentences. Which he CAN do if he works at it.

So school is where we challenge ourselves, to build on what we know, to stretch ourselves to new and greater skills. He smiled and went back to his task.

Personally, I think his handwriting is brilliant. ☺️