Students at Peoria Public School’s Charter Oak Primary School are circling back to pick up a skill that’s been left out of the curriculum for a few years: cursive.
Just before 7:30 a.m. at Charter Oak on a Tuesday, classes aren’t in session yet, but one classroom is home to 16 dedicated pupils already in their seats and working diligently to copy sentences from an overhead projector.
The “Cursive Club” is led by special education teacher Shannon Roach. The students are currently in session 13 of their 16-meeting calligraphy crash course.
“If you can write a word, you can read a word,” Roach said. “We know that handwriting is important. And you don’t want handwriting to inhibit you from being able to actually write something down. Because we know that then you can read it.”
Reading is actually one of the main reasons that Roach’s cadre of third and fourth graders joined the club.
“My mom likes to write in cursive,” said fourth-grader Dominic. “And I really want to read what she tries to write.”
Family members’ use of cursive is a recurring theme in the kids’ reasons for joining the club.
“I wanted to write how my great-grandma Maureen writes in cursive,” said Abby, another student. “My mom, my dad, my granny and my grandma.”
Of course, for some of the students, parents provided a bit more direct encouragement.
“To be honest, my mom wanted good handwriting,” Joy said. “But I joined it so I could write my name in cursive.”
Halfway through the Tuesday morning meeting of the Cursive Club, students copy a poem from the whiteboard.
Roach said Peoria Public Schools recently reintroduced cursive to the second grade curriculum, but it’s been absent for classrooms for almost a decade, leaving a lot of kids without an opportunity to learn the writing style.
“Last year I got a thank you note from a boy for his high school graduation and he said: ‘sorry I write like an eight-year-old,’” Roach said. “And I thought, ‘that is really kind of sad,’ because it’s not that he wanted to have poor handwriting. There just hasn’t been an emphasis.”
Roach said she’s seen kids trying to write in cursive “all the time” on projects and papers. But without proper instruction, that can cause issues when grading or recognizing what assignment belongs to which student.
So, Roach took a look at the curriculum being reintroduced and condensed it into 16, 45-minute sessions that now comprise the twice-a-week meetings of the Cursive Club.
The sessions started simple: learning the shapes of the letters in cursive, both uppercase and lowercase. Roach tried to streamline the process by grouping all of the letters that shared similar strokes or shapes together.
“We tried to do, like, four to six letters in 45 minutes. I know that that’s not ideal, but at least we got a little bit of practice in,” Roach said. “And now we’ve extended it. Because I’m realizing there’s just not enough time for good cursive practice. So we’re just starting to write in sentences and paragraphs.”
As students write sentences about the weather and their plans for the day, Roach paces between the aisles of desks and takes a look, reminding students of the four “keys to legibility:” shape, size, spacing and slant.
“I’ve told the kids that cursive is kind of like artwork,” Roach said. “We might learn a certain style, but they’ll come up with their own style. But it takes practice. Art is a practice and I believe writing in cursive is a practice, too.”
The limited time the Cursive Club has means there isn't a whole lot of space for repetition and refining the students' writing. But, Roach said, that hasn't been much of a problem: students are enthusiastically practicing their cursive outside of the club, writing their names in cursive for other classes' assignments and practicing at home, even over their spring break.
“I had to give them practice to take home and I made it optional, but I couldn’t believe how many kids brought back work and extra work that they had done,” Roach said. “So, I’ve got piles and piles of practice that the kids have brought me, because we don’t have enough time in the day to teach cursive.”
As the Tuesday morning session of the Cursive Club draws to a close, the kids take a seat on a soft rug at the front of the classroom and read old recipes from a series of banners held up by Roach. The instructions for classics like “Ham Casserole” were scrawled in cursive a long time ago. The kids have to take their time deciphering the script, but deftly find their way through the words.
Early childhood learning has improved in some ways, handwriting has fallen by the wayside, said Roach.
“We assume that we can just use computers,” she said. “But I think now, we’re seeing that there’s such a huge gap. We cannot read if we can’t read the writing. So now we need students to be able to write legibly, to be understood.”
Roach doesn’t know for certain yet if Cursive Club will return next year, but, if Charter Oak’s inaugural class is any indication, it’s a skill kids are excited to learn.
