Patriotic Penmanship isn’t your typical run-of-the-mill handwriting practice book of random sentences to copy. Instead, this consumable book for 7th and 8th graders contains some of the most profound quotes our forefathers have made as well as Bible verses, poems and hymns. This book has 30 weeks of cursive handwriting practice and has all you need to make it a handwriting course for a school year.

The beginning of the book has 2 pages where the upper and lower cursive letter is shown in bold ink then next to it the letter is dotted and meant to be traced over. From there, the rest of the line is blank for you to practice writing the letter, both upper case and lower case, on your own. This book does not show you how to form the cursive letters so you would need to have an idea of how to write cursive before starting Patriotic Penmanship Grade 7-8.

Each week’s lesson consists of 2-3 pages with either a quote, scripture, poem or song listed at the top. The author suggests reading the passage to your student at the start of each week. From there, it is up to the teacher how they want to break the lesson up over the week. Each lesson contains a section for tracing practice, writing practice and then writing the full quote. I assigned the different sections for a different day of the week so we took about 3 days to do each lesson.
The tracing practice has the full quote written out for the student to trace. The writing practice section has the quote written out to be traced with an empty section under each line. The student is to trace the words and on the line below it, write out the sentence on their own that they just traced. The full quote section gives the first word of each line but expects the student to fully write out the quote out without any handwriting guidance.

Throughout the book, the author lists a word and its meaning in a small box that the student might not be familiar with. She also gave some suggestions at the beginning of the book on how to use Patriotic Penmanship as a springboard for further discussion and learning beyond handwriting such as studying the person that wrote the quote, find out what made them say or write what they did as well as use the quote to open up discussions with your student. We thought these ideas were a great way to go beyond just handwriting!

My daughter enjoyed Patriotic Penmanship and felt the quotes that were used kept her attention. She said she found herself even memorizing some of them due to the repetition of writing them out. I appreciated the fact that she was writing about pieces of history and scripture. This book would work great for any type of homeschool where the student can work well without guidance. This would also be a great book for a public school student who needs some extra practice. Patriotic Penmanship Grade 7-8 is available for $12.95 and is one that I would recommend for any student who is wanting to practice cursive handwriting.

Product Review by Jenn Porsche, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, May, 2014