It was such a great pleasure meeting with you all during the parent-teacher conferences. Having a strong connection with the families of our students is so beneficial. 🙂 Your openness to share information about your children helps me know them even better. I can feel a deepening of our relationship and a strengthening of our bond. This helps me to grow as a teacher and better serve your child as their guide. Now that I am a mom, I also so appreciate the parenting advice from your experiences. Thank you for all of your great ideas!

The Montessori Connection

In our classroom, we provide the opportunity to learn writing in cursive and reading in cursive and print. The children learn to write in cursive first with the SandPaper Letters, where they trace the letter and learn the sound. After they are familiar with about half of the sounds we move into working with the Movable Alphabet. In this activity, the children build words from letters cut from wood. This activity is parallel to beginning phonetic reading activities.

In these lessons, I write a word in cursive for the child to read. When the child does this work independently, the words are printed. In this way, the child learns how to read in both cursive and print.

Along with the above-mentioned activities, the child is writing sounds with chalk on chalkboards, a sand tray, and pencil/paper. All of the exercises the child has worked on within the Practical Life and Sensorial area helps to develop a strong hand, now ready to put a pencil on paper and write cursive sounds.

Some of the benefits of teaching cursive writing include:

  • Cursive is closer to the natural, curvy, scribbly movements of the child’s first drawings.
  • It is easier to tell where the words begin and end when writing in
  • Some sounds in print are easy to reverse, like b and
  • I also believe that for some, cursive writing may help the flow of ideas as the child moves into creative
  • There is a personal touch with cursive that is unique to that

Song Sharing

Mmm Ah went the little green frog one day Mmm Ah went the little green frog

Mmm Ah went the little green frog one day

And they all go Mmm Mmm Ah But… we know frogs go

(Clap) Shanananana

(Clap) Shanananana (Clap) Shanananana But… we know frogs go (Clap) Shanananana

They don’t go Mmm Mmm Ah

See a YouTube video for melody of this song.