Ever since the '80s when standards study started, handwriting (cursive) practice has become less and less emphasized in schools. For the last 10-15 years, we've been lucky if anyone de facto presented it for more than a few lessons. It's one of those things that need lots of drill/practice which, because of a lawsuit somewhere in the Us while the late '80s, has disappeared. There is no more drill/practice on math facts and the math scores and abilities show it in most schools/kids. Also there has been greater emphasis on reading (not that anyone has changed what they were doing - they are now doing it longer and harder and earlier and that is an additional one story entirely).
Manuscript or Printing
3Rd Grade Math Practice
Children learn the stick and ball/circles and lines coming to manuscript (printing) because they are neurologically ready for those skills by kindergarten; they can't do diagonal lines well until they are about 8 years old. That is why cursive, when taught, commonly begins late 3rd or early/mid 4th grades.
This next section may seem abstract because it is difficult to understand/communicate. Remember, child development is cumulative and when skills aren't mastered, there is no foundation on which to build.
The question with those circles and lines is that they de facto reflect body awareness (very early skills advanced in children), but at an abstract level (theoretically children can understand/apply the abstract when they have mastered the concrete/physical. Think about the fact that you have 3 midlines on your body: left/right (line drawn from the top of your head vertically down to in the middle of your legs); front/back (line drawn head to foot but centered if you were in silhouette); and top/bottom (line drawn over your waist). Hope you have those visuals. These concepts are also language concepts, and many children have language deficits in school. That is an additional one article.
Children learn to creep and crawl in development (precursor skill to standing and walking). Those actions involve crossing all of your midlines and/or centering your weight accordingly - try it yourself where no one can see you (doing it gradually so you can feel the shifts/changes). Those midlines "relate" to the lined paper we use in school. The horizontal line is the top/bottom midline. Ever consideration how some kids letters sit on top of the line or float above it rather than going below it? These are midline awareness problems. Everyone knows citizen who reverse b and d in printing - left/right midline awareness problems. [Note: Front and back don't chronicle to 2 dimensional work.] Children who have difficulty remembering b from d tend to use capital letters, even if it is in the middle of a word, because they don't have to consolidate on which is which; spelling is hard adequate to remember which letters make what sound and then put those letters in the strict order in the first place.
Another question with manuscript/print writing is the spaces. Some children don't identify time/space well, so their words are mashed totally together. A compensatory tactic to get them to space words is to put a finger after a word so they can't begin the next one immediately. The benefit to cursive is that it forces word divorce and great use of space, but neurologically impaired children often have difficulty with spatial relationships. Some students only write on the right, left, top or lowest of a page, misunderstand what margins are (and how to indicate them), where to begin writing (letter and total writing reversals like mirror writing).
Cursive
Cursive has some basic forms: lines (t, u, w, v, i), loops (b, e, f, h, j, k, l, p, q), humps (a, c, d, g, h, k, m, n, o, v, x, y, z). Of course, many of them are combinations of those three forms. There are also directional shifts and puzzling non-shifts (think f, g, q, z) Cursive requires stopping and starting within a letter (think a, c, d, etc.), crossing midlines which may not have been mastered (think, b, f, g, h, etc.) and recognizing starting and ending (picking up pencil/pen and animated a space to start an additional one word). When you are writing, you don't think about it at all, but a child must remember: sound-symbol association (letters and sounds and then within that, the strict letter combinations and in which order), letter and sound sequences (gril/girl and brid/bird are frequent errors for elementary and middle school (sometimes high school) students, and then letter formation. Without a lot of repetitive practice, guess what loses? Cursive writing.
Frequently studying disabled students deal with all of the above, in expanding to much more. If they aren't solid in their own body positions in space (and those spatial relationships associated to prepositions in language), they have difficulties when teachers give directions (oral will confuse when paired with visual stimuli which is what most teachers enduringly do) when demonstrating strict letter formation (also, when a educator turns his/her back to the class to write on the board, that is when behavior problems begin.
As for reading cursive, that is roughly like dealing with a foreign language because letter formations aren't like those on this page. When children have trouble reading in the first place (i.e., Ld kids), they give up. More and more teachers even in high school have to print on the boards/overheads in class if they want students to read and learn what they are teaching.
Back in the dark ages of education, students spent 40 minutes 2-3 times a week doing drill and practice with a educator who walked nearby and watched us do the work agreeing to directions: up, down, up, down, etc. Or up, down, curve to the left, up to the line and cross the lines, nearby and back to the line then out (that was the letter p). We used fountain pens so mistakes couldn't be erased and the educator could see where we didn't succeed directions - boring was an understatement and probably what contributed to the lawsuit about drill/practice work in schools.
Drill and practice is considerable for some skills to be learned. Without the repetition and practice, our bodies don't maintain the information. Drill and practice is consistently used in athletics: throwing, catching, defensive/offensive techniques, etc. Athletes become adept straight through practice. study has eliminated much practice in the classroom in favor of other skills which are also needed. Cursive writing has been sacrificed to those other skills.
additional resources The End of Cursive Writing
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