Category: Tracing

10 FREE Cursive Handwriting Resources

9/14/2016

One question that I am asked fairly frequently is:

"How do you teach genealogy to a group of children when everyone's family tree is different?

It's a great question, and I usually respond by saying that genealogy SKILLS can be taught without getting into specifics of everyone's lineage. You might not even think about it as you are actively researching, but we use a LOT of learned skills when we are searching out and learning about our ancestors, and many of those skills can (and should) be taught to kids.

For example, knowing how to read cursive handwriting is a skill that is crucial for us to learn in order to read and interpret letters and documents of the past. And the first step in learning how to read cursive is learning how to write it.

Below, I have compiled a list of the ten best FREE online resources for teaching elementary-aged children how to write cursive. Many schools today do not have cursive in their regular curriculum, but it is easy to teach your child the basics of cursive at home in very little time. Because it is NOT in the schools, many kids today do not perceive it as 'schoolwork'; instead they see it as more of an art, and they are more inclined to practice it, especially if they naturally enjoy drawing or using their hands to create.

Most of the resources listed below include FREE printable worksheets, and I've also included a couple of YouTube videos that I think do a great job of demonstrating the cursive strokes and letter formation.

1.) The HEV Project: How To Write in Cursive - A Complete Course
Comprehensive series of short YouTube videos AND corresponding worksheets for learning cursive handwriting. I've linked to one of the videos below.

2.) Free Cursive Handwriting Worksheets: FreeHomeschoolDeals.com and This Reading Mama
Fifty-five page handwriting pack.

3.) McGraw-Hill Grade 3 Handwriting Workbook (80 pages)
Full-length penmanship textbook.

4.) Super Smart Kids Club: Cursive Writing Complete A-Z Uppercase + Lowercase
An extended comprehensive YouTube video demonstrating strokes for each uppercase and lowercase letter with a fun cartoon-like interface.

5.) A-Z Cursive Handwriting Worksheets from Confessions of a Homeschooler (29 pages)
Cute color pages for tracing and freewriting each letter of the alphabet. Includes a 'starter' dot for each letter repetition to guide kids where to start each letter formation.

6.) Cursive Writing Worksheets from K5Learning.com

7.) HandWritingWorksheets.com
Create custom cursive worksheets for practicing individual words, sentences, or entire paragraphs.

8.) Cursive Bible ABCs from BibleStoryPrintables.com
A nice resource integrating cursive education with Bible stories and vocabulary.

9.) Cursive Handwriting Practice from WorksheetWorks.com
Another nice site that generates custom cursive practice worksheets.

10.) Cursive Alphabet Worksheets from K12Reader.com
Nice, color practice printables for every letter of the alphabet.

So, I encourage you to check out these resources and consider teaching the children in your life cursive handwriting. Once they get a little practice with it, show them a cursive-written letter or other document from your family history files, and have them try to read it. Many kids will be excited at the prospect of being able to "decode" writing that they, at one time, could not read, and hopefully they will continue to search out more documents to keep practicing their new skill!

©2016 Emily Kowalski Schroeder

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Family Unit Turkeys

11/11/2014

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Family Unit Turkey

In previous posts, I've explored activities that help children recognize extended family members and learn relationship vocabulary. (Easter Egg Family Faces, The BIG Family Tree). But I've noticed that my kids, specifically my four year old daughter, still have trouble with how parts of her extended family are more or less "organized." She didn't quite realize that, for example, Daddy is a member of two smaller family units - our family and his parents' family. I needed an activity that could demonstrate 'nuclear' family units in an interactive, visual manner. Combine that with the fact that Thanksgiving is right around the corner and Family Unit Turkey's were born!

Supplies needed for this activity:
- Colorful paper
- Cardboard box
- Scissors
- Glue
- Pencil and Markers
- Googly Eyes (optional)

Each turkey we made would represent one family unit. We would write the family's surname(s) on the belly of the turkey and each feather would represent one person in the family.

First, I created tracing templates from the sides of a cardboard box. I cut them out, and my daughter used these to trace the turkeys' bodies and feathers.

Turkey Body Tracing Template

I showed my daughter how to trace on the back of the paper, so that the pencil line would not show when we cut it out. She chose each color/pattern for each family member.

Tracing One of the Turkey Feathers

After the tracing, she wanted to cut out the turkey feathers on her own. (Cutting with scissors is a skill they are practicing in her preschool class.) Of course, we used safety scissors and I watched her carefully the whole time. The feathers shapes do not have to be cut perfectly; in fact, I think they look better with some jagged edges - more like real turkey feathers!

Cutting out a turkey feather.

After we were done cutting, it was time to glue the feathers onto the turkey body. Then, we used various markers to label the turkey with the family surname and each feather with a family member's first name. This was a teaching moment in and of itself, because my daughter did not know all of her grandparents' first names. (Young children do not inherently realize that adults even HAVE first names!)

I cut out little triangles for the turkey beaks and we found some googly eyes in our craft cabinet. If you do not have googly eyes available, you can cut circles out of the paper or just draw on eyes with markers.

We made three turkeys in all; her attention span was done after that. We created a turkey for our own little family, for my family, and for my husband's family. Each turkey had a different number of feathers, so we counted them and talked about how some families are bigger and some are smaller. We also talked about how mom and dad are actually a part of two family units, and I think this activity helped her better associate each of her aunts and uncles with the correct side of the family. ("Uncle Jeff is Mommy's brother and Grandma and Grandpa K.'s son.")

Our Finished Turkeys!

Please do not feel like you have to have perfect nuclear families in your tree to do this activity with the children in your life. A family unit can be defined however you wish. You could stick with traditional biological family units, or you can create your turkeys based on family members who live together. Children can and should put themselves in more than one family unit if they share their time with their parents' or guardians' separate families.

Have fun making your turkeys and have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

©2014, Emily Kowalski Schroeder

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Surname Activities

9/20/2014

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To a young child, the idea of having a surname in addition to her first name is sometimes a difficult concept to grasp and understand. But, once a child does understand that some family members share names and that her surname is different from her friend's name, do not be afraid to start talking about your family's history and identity using the surnames in your family tree. Here, I have listed some simple hands-on activities that I have developed to help my kids start to recognize some of the surnames in our family tree. Many of the activities are multi-disciplinary in nature and will also help children with listening, writing, and memory skills.

Tracing and Writing Surnames

Teaching children how to write letters is one of those things in life in which repetition is absolutely the key to success. So, why not spend some of that practice time writing names? If you simply Google, 'blank writing paper,' you will find many websites that offer free, printable preschool and Kindergarten-level writing paper. What if your child is not yet comfortable writing letters on their own? Fortunately, there are also some sites (KB Teachers, WorksheetWorks.com) that will allow you to create worksheets with traceable words. This is exactly what I did for my four year old daughter:

Listening With Google Translate

Last weekend at the breakfast table, I was telling my husband about a surname blog post I had written about one of his German ancestral families with the surname of Waterkotte. I mentioned that I had thrown a Google Translate audio link into the blog post, so that reader could understand better why the surname became Watercutter in the U.S. My six year old son wanted to hear it, so I got out my laptop and played the audio for him. He LOVED it, so I typed in a few other surnames from our family tree and played them in their original ethnic tongues. He was so engaged, and as we were listening to the clips, I was able to mention things like, "This was great-grandma's last name before she was married," and "Grandma K's mom was born in Italy." Using the Sound of Text website, you can play and download an .mp3 audio file of the Google Translate pronunciation of words and phrases up to 100 characters. For example, here is the Polish pronunciation of my paternal grandmother's maiden name, Bodziony.

Matching Activities

Even before children can read, they do have the ability to figure out when two words look the same, and knowing how to recognize the same word over and over again will make learning how to read that much easier when the time comes. So, when you are working on word recognition with young children, why not take a break from some of the typical shorter words like dog, cat, toy, etc. and use surnames? I made a simple matching worksheet in which the child can just draw lines to the same name on each side of the paper. You can include as many or as few names as you want, depending on your individual child's interest and attention span.

Or, you may cut out those names on the sheet, flip them over, and play a traditional matching game with the child. If you find two matching names and you get to keep the pair. The person with the most pairs wins.

Surname Matching // GrowingLittleLeaves.com

Arranging

Perhaps you know an elementary-aged child who is learning how to put words and names in alphabetical order. Or, if you have an middle- or high school-aged child, you can really start to talk about the ethnic origins of individual surnames in your tree. Try sitting down with them, examining the names, and group them into different nationality or language groups.

Mapping

Does your child like looking at maps? The Worldnames Public Profiler website contains a modern-day database of eight million different surnames from 26 countries across the world. Simply type in a name, and the site show you on a map where the name is relatively common, and it will give you statistics on 'frequency per million.' Some regions of the world are better represented than others; for example, most of Europe is well-represented in the data, but, unfortunately, Latin America is not. Here is an example map of Poland using the surname Bodziony:

So, you can see that there are many ways in which to introduce kids to the surnames within their family trees, even if they can yet truly understand what an ancestor is or that great-great-grandpa was alive 100 years ago. If you start talking about and showing them the names now, there is a better chance that they won't be overwhelmed later when they are old enough to begin to understand more of the details associated with their family history.

©2014, copyright Emily Kowalski Schroeder.