6 November 2012 Loopercase

The thing about homeschooling is that you can have an idea–maybe even a plan–of what you’re going to do in a given day/week/semester/year and then usually you end up spending said day/week/semester/year watching it all turn out differently.

Kids have their own timetables. Take Sam and loopercase writing.

Loopercase writing is Sam’s word for cursive. I think she uttered it around age 3, looking at my loopy writing, and we thought the term so damn cute that we adopted it as a family.

Last year Sam expressed an interest in learning how to write loopercase. I did some research. I bought her a book. We started it and immediately it became clear that she was Not Ready. She refused to follow the directions of how to form the letters. I kept showing her that cursive writing requires a particular sequence of strokes, but she wouldn’t have it. So I put the book away.

In September she expressed interest again and so out came the book, and lo and behold, she was Ready! She’s been doing a couple of pages a week. I estimated that she’d finish the book sometime in the spring. That seemed like the perfect pace–a little bit each week, slow and steady.

This morning she opened the book and did the pages for the letter M. And then she did N. And then she went on to the next letter and the next letter and I lost track.

We went to the park for a few hours. I stopped her from bringing the loopercase book in the car. But when we returned home she went right back to it, blowing through all the rest of the lowercase letters, the uppercase letters and the final review. I kept trying to get her to take a break. She wouldn’t have it.

Sam finished the book and started writing little notes to her father, to me, to anyone she could think of, all before dinnertime. She kept asking me what she could add to the grocery list on the refrigerator. It was like a compulsion. My kid is addicted to cursive.

And that’s the thing about homeschooling. I would have had Sam do a little each week, culminating in completion of the handwriting book sometime in the spring, and probably three quarters of the time she would have fought me tooth and nail.

Sometimes learning happens in fits and starts. Sometimes it happens in one huge fit and as a parent, the best thing–and maybe the only thing–you can do is hand the kid a shopping list and get out of the way.

Incidentally, the note in the picture is one that Sam wrote to AC so he would remember to come home from his near-month long business trip that starts tomorrow.