Of the further stages, little need be said. Secure that the child begins by making perfect letters and is never allowed to make faulty ones, and the rest he will do for himself; as for 'a good hand,' do not hurry him; his 'handwriting' will come by-and-by out of the character that is in him; but, as a child, he cannot be said, strictly speaking, to have character. CM Vol 1 p 234
Do some of CM's methods stress you out? Especially when she uses words like "perfect"? Let me tell you, when I see the work I do, much less that of my young children, I find so many faults that I would hyperventilate if "perfect" were the only work accepted.
And yet perseverence and striving and high, yet gracious, expectations are very good virtues to practice when teaching children.
My first-born has borne the brunt of much experimenting. When she was young (probably too young), I set before her a Wal-Mart tablet with the lower and upper case alphabet and little arrows showing which direction to write them. I let her have at it, not even thinking to sit next to her to make sure she formed the letters correctly. After seeing her work, I simply thought she'd outgrow the slipshod work. Unfortunately her printing has only improved slightly and a lot of remedial work has been tried. Fortunately she has eagerly taken to cursive and typing, and with the expectation of best work and correct formation every time (or as often as I catch it), her cursive is a vast improvement over her printing.
Second child has had it better because he's been taught with me sitting beside him from the beginning. Even with keen eyes he somehow started forming his o's beginning at the bottom instead of the top! And so we erase and redo, or better yet, I stop him and remind him, "Start your o at the top." A good practice we sometimes do is for me to show him how to form each letter he'll be working on that day by writing the word or phrase while he watches. Then he can write with a fresh reminder on his brain.
Third child is spending this year tracing a letter on some alphabet cards we have, drawing it in the air, and then drawing it in a pan of grits (we had a bunch of grits on hand :-). We'll move on to forming with Handwriting w/o Tears wood pieces (actually thick poster board ~ much cheaper) and writing the letter on the chalk board. Then we'll finally move to writing on paper.
And fourth child walks around babbling. He babbles "perfectly" though!
So while I wouldn't say we have perfected "perfect letter formation", I would say we're much better at persevering in redoing letters until they are correctly formed to best effort. And this should lead to clean, nice looking handwriting with a little unique character thrown in as the children grow up.
