Why teach handwriting in the digital age?

Check out this article for some answers.
http://bit.ly/18FCwHr

Several comments appear from a person who is often quoted as if they were credentialed as a handwriting expert when this is not the case. People who give themselves a big presence on the internet by commenting on one blog after the other are often seen as knowing what they are talking about. One wonders how much research is done by those who write articles when they are searching for someone to talk to on each side of an issue, whatever that issue may be.

FOUR Benefits of writing by hand

http://mentalfloss.com/article/33508/4-benefits-writing-hand

Flugle, Starnash, and Wimpolly: How Sight-Reading Affects Reading Ability

With phonics systems in place in most classrooms, many more children are picking up literacy with relative ease. However, 20% of children in English-speaking nations reach age 11 unable to pass a reading test.

Why?

Everyone has different learning styles, be that visual, kinaesthetic, or auditory. Kids with strong visual processing ability often favour this over the auditory (which is essential for phonics) when it comes to learning how to read. These children may or may not be diagnosed with dyslexia around the age of 7 or 8. Gifted visual learners will pick up the alphabet and simple words through sight-memorization and repetition very quickly.

But they are using a technique that will eventually fail them.  

As vocabulary and spelling gets more complex, these kids can no longer rely on their sight memory or the context as a trigger and so they begin to guess very wildly. The visual memory was simply not designed to hold thousands of combinations of fine-tuned black squiggly lines! That is why the auditory function is so essential when learning to read.

There is a simple test you can use to assess whether a child – or adult – is a sight-reader rather than a decoder. If they can read the first paragraph ok, but find the second paragraph much more difficult and the third nearly impossible, then they are using sight-memorization strategies to process text. This means they are very gifted visually, but have been misapplying this strength to the reading context.

Paragraph 1 (normal):
The country farm was in a deep valley. It covered 100 acres of green, rolling hills and in the winter was buried under a thick layer of heavy snow. Ben the farmer thought it was the best place to be in the entire world.
Paragraph 2 (letters mixed up):
His two-door, sporty car was panited oarnge, with braod, yleolw stirpes running aolng the roof. Jim lvoed his Mstunag more than aynthnig in his life.
Paragraph 3 (nonsense):
The brin, smight fload is where glagged balfs trow fron with oabs and snuts and flates of shrab. If you vroy after them juffedly with smoor and slirk, you will gwipe a shnook.

Guided Phonetic Reading technique was developed for sight-readers with weak auditory function. It is a revolutionary approach to remedial literacy that actually utilizes these children’s bright visual processing cortex as a tool to teach them.

See how this works over at Morgan Learning website. Morgan Learning publishes the Easyread System, an online course for children with highly visual learning styles, dyslexia, auditory processing disorder and more. It works through short, fun, daily lessons that are fully supported with one-on-one coaching and consultation.

Hartford Courant article

I was just sent an article that was in the 4/28 issue of the Hartford Courant in Connecticut.  The Assumption School in Manchester, CT, has a student who won the State Level and is eligible to compete in the Annual Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest (I didn't know it existed).  More than 285,000 students entered this year's 22nd annual contest with the winner to be awarded later this month.  

In the article, it explained that at the Assumption School, students learn manuscript and cursive by the 3rd grade and receive 15 minutes of daily handwriting instruction - the amount recommended by experts.  A teacher at the school stated that there is significant research showing handwriting instruction enhances both cognitive and motor skills development and activates regions of the brain associated with thinking, short-term memory and language.

Irene Lambert

Interview with Fiona Summons

From Australian handwriting professional, Jasmin Martin:

Last year in December, as I was in Australia, Ingrid Seger Woznicki and I interviewed Fiona Summons of the Alison Lawson Centre. She is a specialist in dyslexia and treats children and adults with dyslexia as well as the other 'dyses'. She in particular is a supporter of handwriting being kept on the school curriculum. We interviewed Fiona and a series of videos with the questions has been put together (I will try to do this a little more professionally later) but for now if anyone is interested the videos are on our web site:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyqTSktL6QM&list=PLyX27TSriW-XFFrv9a-d6Z00LMDQCvL_X

You can watch all of them in sequence by clicking on the link above. The question posed and which she answers is in the title of the video.

Top Tips on practicing cursive writing . . .

http://www.amazinghandwriting.org/top-tips-on-cursive-handwriting-practice/

What Learning Cursive Does for Your Brain

Excellent article, highly recommended:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201303/what-learning-cursive-does-your-brain

When disasters strike...

This morning I awoke to this news, “Meteorite strikes central Russia, hundreds injured”.  Something like this does not have any impact on our lives directly, but it is something to think about.  We are so heavily dependent on computer access/reliability that we may want to consider what information we have secured either on disk or printed hard copy.  The following articles have been written in the past and I think are worth re-reading to remind ourselves of our vulnerability.  Of course at the foundation is the need to ensure everyone is still able to write by hand should technology fail.

The following articles have been printed in one of our national newspapers that can give us cause for concern regarding our dependence on computers:

1) National Post, September 26, 2009 pg. A27 by Peter Godspeed - " In 2007, Beijing shocked the world when it demonstrated its satellite killing capabilities by destroying an ageing Chinese weather satellite 680 km. above the earth.  Dennis Blair US Director national intelligence: "Washington has serious concerns over the threats in the cyberworld."  US could be caught off guard in a space "Pearl Harbor".  China has used space weapons against US spy satellites.

2) Globe and Mail, June 15, 2010 Social Studies - " The sun is about to get a lot more active, which could have ill effects on Earth," Space.com reports. "...Solar storms occur when sunspots on our star erupt and spew out flumes of charged particles that can damage power systems.  The sun's activity typically follows an 11 year cycle, it looks to be coming out of a slump and gearing up for an active period...People of the 21st century rely on high tech systems for the basics of daily life.  But smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications can all be knocked out by intense solar activity.  A major solar storm could cause 20 times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina, warned the (U.S.) National  Academy of Sciences in a 2008 report. ...Luckily much of the damage can be mitigated if managers know a storm is coming."

3) Globe and Mail, February 3, 2011 Social Studies - "Space is so littered with debris that a collision between satellites could set off an 'uncontrolled chain reaction' capable of destroying the communications network on Earth, a Pentagon report has warned " The Daily Telegraph says, "The volume of abandoned rockets, shattered satellites and missile shrapnel in the Earth's orbit is reaching a 'tipping point' and is now threatening the $250-billion [U.S.] space services industry, scientists said.  A single collision between two satellites or large pieces of 'space junk' could send thousands of pieces of debris spinning into orbit, each capable of destroying  further satellites.  Global positioning systems, international phone connections, television signals and weather forecasts are among the services that are at risk of crashing to a halt." 

Edda Manley

CURSIVE WRITING: POSITIVE STROKES

Letter to the Editor of Canada's Globe and Mail, by Elaine Charal:

As a long-time career Certified Handwriting Analyst, it was distressing for me to read your article in Friday’s Globe and Mail, predominantly because there was no reference to Canadian education or Canadian schools, or even mentioning that the Ontario school curriculum guideline states that “…by the end of Grade 7 students will use legible printing and cursive writing.”

Linda Sweet, Founder of Glenburnie School, a leading private school in Oakville and Mississauga, continues to have cursive handwriting firmly anchored on the Glenburnie classroom timetable.  She states that using Callirobics, a Handwriting Exercises kit that combines music and creative graphics for 5 minutes per day, her students move very quickly and successfully to cursive writing without the usual tedium of practices and shakiness that can often accompany early cursive experiences. 

The challenge lies not with learning cursive writing, but the knowledge of the education tools that make cursive easy and fun.  The root of the challenge lies with the young teachers (who themselves were not instructed properly) receiving cursory (pun intended) instruction on how to teach cursive writing.  However, there are progressive Ontario elementary schools such as Armour Heights School actively instructing cursive to Grade 3 and 4 students.

Printing was never meant to replace cursive, but as a pre-cursor (again, pun intended) ‘ball-and-stick method’ to launch into cursive writing.  The physical process of cursive writing causes information to be more powerfully entered into the brain by producing stronger neuro-pathways than simply pressing keys or choosing to print.  Research by the University of Western Ontario has shown that cursive writing is actually more efficient than printing because there are fewer pen lifts.  The very definition of cursive, in Latin, is ‘to run’. 

Learning to cursive write helps a child focus and concentrate and helps to calm the emotional part of the Brain.  Over 3,000 nerve endings in each fingertip directly connected to the brain are stimulated when using cursive.

The leading schools in Europe correctly teach the children to cursive write in grade one.  These young students, fluent in cursive and being encouraged by their more traditional parents, can be seen in coffee houses all over the city with pen in hand working in study groups and using cursive writing.  These children will become the doctors, lawyers and upper management rather than the children with less discipline who have ‘lower case’ ‘reading/writing/and ‘rithmatic skills.

Send Indiana your good wishes...

Theresa Ortega sent a link to this article. A vote will be taken in Indiana on January 23rd (ironically, National Handwriting Day!)  on Senator Leising's bill to return cursive handwriting training to schools:
http://content.govdelivery.com/bulletins/gd/INSTATE-67766e#.UPr8DA_jRT8.facebook