Timberdoodle's CursiveLogic Review

I have another Timberdoodle product to share with you today!  This time it's an innovative, patent-pending method for teaching cursive handwriting, CursiveLogic.

CursiveLogic

Many schools have chosen to omit cursive writing instruction for various reasons.  Honestly this has really bothered me and I intentionally teach my children cursive, usually around 3rd grade.  CursiveLogic is made to be a faster way to learn cursive because rather than teaching the alphabet letter by letter as in most cursive programs, CursiveLogic's method focuses on four basic letter shapes - oval, loop, swing and mound.  This idea is for students to master cursive handwriting at a much faster pace.

This combined teacher's manual and student workbook is spiral-bound and 112 pages.  It includes step-by-step instructions for teaching cursive with the CursiveLogic method.  It has student lessons, practice sheets and even dry-erase surfaces as well.   It is appropriate for children as young as 6 and 7 and can be adapted to suit the needs of older children, even adults (2nd grade and beyond).  It includes information about grip, body and hand placement as well as suggestions if your child is left-handed.

Here is a page that helps you see the correct grip.

Miss E with her CursiveLogic book

I decided to use this program with E (age 8, 2nd grade) who hasn't had any cursive instruction and I think she is really liking it.  It has been fairly easy for her to distinguish between the four different shapes and she is encouraged in that.  Students first learn the four different letter shapes - oval, loop, swing and mound.  They are introduced to the oval stroke first.  They learn the oval stroke through tracing and writing.  Next they learn the oval letter string, which is all the oval letters connected together.  Again, they will trace and write.  They will then practice different letter combinations and connections within the oval stroke group.  They will also write oval letter words.  Afterwards, they will be introduced to the loop stroke in the same fashion as the oval stroke.  Then the swing stroke, etc.

You can see the four different shapes above and how E grouped/color coded them together.

E tracing the oval stroke.

 E's completed oval stroke practice sheet.

Students learn the letter strings for each shape as well.

In CursiveLogic, students work through learning the oval letters (orange), loop letter (lime), swing letters (silver) and mound letters (mauve).  After all the lowercase letters have been learned, students will learn the uppercase letters in groups of letters with similar shapes.  E is still learning the lowercase letters as we haven't quite reached the uppercase letters yet.  I look forward to finishing this program with her soon!

I like how friendly this curriculum is to use.  It is spiral bound at the top so that it will work equally well for both left-handed and right-handed students.  You work through it using only the front of each page, then when you reach the end you flip the whole workbook over and come back through the reverse way - the page numbers make it super easy to follow!  I like that it has lots of opportunity to practice, including the dry-erase practice pages.

CursiveLogic is part of Timberdoodle's 3rd Grade Curriculum Kit.

Check out the video below to get a feel for CursiveLogic yourself and see how quickly cursive can be learned!



Disclosure: Huge shout out to Timberdoodle for selecting me as a Timberdoodle Blogger. Timberdoodle sent my family CursiveLogic in exchange for our honest review. All opinions are my own.