Spencerian Penmanship

Old Fashioned Handwriting Curriculum

If you long for elegant handwriting the old fashioned way, you will appreciate Spencerian Penmanship for teaching cursive in the homeschool setting. When my children want to have very nice handwriting after they learn a basic cursive, I encourage them to use the Spencerian workbooks. Typically they use this curriculum when they are in middle school or older. Spencerian Penmanship is also used with the Prairie Primer literature based unit study curriculum for grades 3 to 6.

Writing Instruments

While the instructions call for dipping your pen into the bottle of ink, we used a mechanical pencil. These books were written over 100 years ago! If you want that old fashioned "calligraphy" look, there are calligraphy pens available with tips that are similar to those in use at that time. These come with ink cartridges which are better than dipping the pen into an ink bottle. You could also use a ball point pen with a finer point.

Spencerian Penmanship