Homeschool · Writing
Classic books for learning to write well, from Arnold and Kittredge's Mother Tongue to Palmer's business handwriting and Brooks and Hubbard's Composition-Rhetoric, free to read here or download, with step-by-step teaching guides for The Mother Tongue and the Palmer Method.
Begin with The Mother Tongue for speaking and writing, and the Palmer Method for handwriting, side by side. Each guide takes you through its book one lesson at a time.
Writing grows best a little at a time, most days. Before a child writes something down, let them say it out loud first, telling back a story, describing a picture or a walk, until the sentences come easily. Then write a few of those sentences down, and read them back together. Copying a short, good passage, and later writing it from dictation, teaches spelling, punctuation and sentence shape all at once.
Handwriting is a separate skill, and a few minutes a day does more than one long session a week. Sit well, hold the pen lightly, and stop before the hand gets tired. Palmer's drills and the Spencerian copies were made for older children and adults, so a young child may only manage a line or two at first. Some usage and a few rules in these books are old-fashioned; where they differ from what is taught now, go with the modern rule.
In rough order of age.
Sarah Louise Arnold and George Lyman Kittredge's lessons in speaking, reading and writing English, in three parts for the fourth, fifth and sixth years of school. Good prose and poems to read, talk about and learn by heart, with models to copy and many subjects to write about, and a first introduction to grammar.
Scanned from an original 1900 Ginn printing.
The companion volume, “an elementary English grammar” by the same authors, on the sentence and its parts and then the parts of speech, with many exercises. Introductory chapters on what language is are meant to be read aloud and talked over.
Scanned from a University of Toronto copy.
Stratton D. Brooks and Marietta Hubbard's high school course in writing, built on the idea that pupils improve by writing new pieces often, not by copying out corrections. Its aim is to help every pupil write freely, clearly and forcibly.
Scanned from a University of Toronto copy.
A few minutes a day.
A. N. Palmer's self-teaching lessons in plain, rapid “muscular movement” handwriting, the most widely taught American handwriting of the early twentieth century. Drills of ovals and push-pulls come before letters and words.
Scanned from a University of California Libraries copy.
The full handbook to the Spencerian system, the flowing, slanted hand of nineteenth-century America, prepared by the “Spencerian Authors”, the sons of its founder Platt Rogers Spencer and their associates. It explains position, movement and the forms of the letters, step by step.
Scanned from a Cornell University copy.
For spelling and grammar, see Spelling and Grammar; for reading, McGuffey's Readers. To make handwriting and copywork pages, use the practice sheets.
Every book here was published before 1931, so it is in the public domain in the United States: free to read, print and share. The scans are kept by the Internet Archive, which shows them on this page and supplies the PDF downloads. The teaching guides are written for this site. Modern reprints are also sold, if you prefer a clean printed copy.