Teaching Cursive Writing Strokes with Watercolor Paint

Learning should be fun, but when you're teaching cursive writing, it can be a challenge to make learning cursive writing fun. Today, we threw in a bit of art (shame on all you administrators for taking it out of classrooms) and we learned how to write cursive letter strokes using watercolors.

A student will make more fluid natural strokes using a paintbrush, so this is a super way to connect watercolor painting and cursive writing.

We started with the basic cursive writing strokes: undercurve, downcurve, overcurve, slant, and connector.

 

Using a paintbrush, it's easy to work with moving the brush and holding the brush in the right way to make the strokes.

The kiddos used different color paints and practiced their strokes across the sheet of paper. Oh, did I mention that they had fun learning cursive too? Art belongs in the classroom. It's a super teaching tool.

Thanks for stopping by,
Robin Sellers @ Sweet Tea Classroom

Integrate Fun: Cursive Writing and Art

In my last post, I shared how to introduce cursive writing. This post adds another technique you can use to prepare your kiddos for cursive writing. I love to integrate fun and this post adds even more fun to cursive writing. We integrated art and cursive and got some super results.

To get started writing in cursive, we wrote some cursive loopy letters (b, k, h, e, l, q, p , j, f) and the kiddos used markers to color in the loops. Some letters have loops that go up, some go down, and some have both.

This was good, easy fun.  Since we're working with loopy letters first, I asked the kiddos to use different colored markers and make a series of the cursive letter l across a sheet of plain white paper. Then I asked them to create more lines of loop styles across the page. We used the loopy letters in the works bike, hello, quiz, and fish as guides. Check out our work. Pretty fun, right?

cursive writing art

Remember that we're making art, not writing cursive letters, so the experience is fun. The results are super and worthy of displaying. I've found that the skinny Crayola markers work well for this too.

Next we tied in a concept that I wrote about in the last post. The letters in cursive words are connected. We got our yarn out again and matched it up with our loopy art to demonstrate how all these cursive writing loops were connected.

Cursive writing with children doesn't have to be a challenge. It can be a work of art! Please follow my blog by e-mail to catch the next post in this cursive writing series. Hint--it's about cursive, art, and .....fun!

Integrate Fun: Cursive Writing and a Cat's Cradle

I'm always on the lookout for ways to integrate fun into our learning. Today we made learning cursive writing fun and like a piece of woven artwork. Yes, we went loopy today. {I was afraid that I'd have to say that one day--ha.} Actually, we started the foundations for writing cursive letters in a fun way. Here's how.

Have you ever made a Cat's Cradle with yarn looped between your fingers? We did. We started watching this YouTube video {Here} for how to create many creations like the Cat's Cradle, Cat's Whiskers, and the Eiffel tower.

Then we tied together that long string of yarn and moved it around on our own. As we did, we talked about an important concept. The concept is that cursive writing is like that piece of yarn. It is connected--plus we had a little bit of movement and fun too.

This technique gets those little fingers warmed up and ready to get writing. This is a simple way to teach a very practical concept. When students write in cursive, they have to learn to keep their letters connected, just like they are a piece of string or yarn.

If you've got a multicolored piece of yarn, you can explain how each different color could be a different letter on the same string.

Save that piece of yarn. We'll use it again for another cursive writing technique coming up in a future post.

Enjoy!
Robin @ Sweet Tea Classroom