The Handwriting for the 21st Century Summit was held in Washington DC on January 23rd, 2012. Educators and researchers are concerned that the Common Core Curriculum, which aims towards a National Standards Test in 2014 (more than 40 states have agreed to participate), has left cursive writing out of the curriculum.
Three important points from that summit meeting were:
1) that fMRI research shows that children develop adult-like connections in the brain once they have learned handwriting to the point that it is automated. This cannot be accomplished by reading to children or by keyboarding; you must write by hand to do it
2) During the 1960’s and ‘70’s handwriting and spelling was emphasized and content was considered less important. In the 1980’s and ‘90’s the standard changed to making content the most important, and handwriting and spelling were no longer emphasized.
3) It was agreed that handwriting is one of the foundation skills that must be kept in the curriculum, and lots of work needs to be done to make this happen.
Many of the younger teachers today did not receive enough practice in cursive writing to feel confident to use it never mind teach it. It has always been interesting to me that illiteracy rates have escalated with the de-emphasis on handwriting.
Edda Manley (Canada)
I am currently speaking with the Board of Chester County Schools. It is a struggle, but none of the school board members knew anything about the development of the brain using cursive writing. They are mandated to follow the Obama Common Core Standards and I am working hard to voice the concerns. After 3rd grade, no one is required to cursive and the school board has permitted individual teachers to decide whether to use a 'block of time' during their day to teach cursive. When searching the curriculum for Chester County School District, I could only find three (3) areas where cursive was mentioned. I am also concerned if the school board follows the statistics of their children to determine the percent of those developing at a slower rate because of leaving cursive out of the daily lessons. I was told the decisions are not based upon cursive and printing, but test scores. This saddens me and I have a 5 yr, old granddaughter to worry about. At this point, she is in private school in Kindergarten where they DO teach cursive and have no plans to remove it as far as I know.
ReplyDeleteThanks Sheila for putting this together. It is on my FB page and I will talk and preach until I have no voice left.
Congratulations! This is a great start. We may want to expand our blog vision to also include educating the general public about the importance of cursive handwriting to academic success.
ReplyDeleteIris Hatfield
New American Cursive
We need all the help we can get on this effort. We'll be putting up more blogs with information about the research in the field and ask you to spread it to educators and parents.
ReplyDeleteHow can the AHAF Chapters specifically help in this effort?
ReplyDeleteThe chapters (and anyone) can send people to this blog to comment and spread the word to the educators and parents they know.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter-in-law is an active educator/master teacher in the Orange County, California elementary school system. The teachers are being given (at $10,000 a pop) electronic 'white boards' that interact with the students at their desks. They teach on the white board, the children respond with electronic keyboards onto the white board. It's touted as "interactive". Read: more electronics, more screens, more isolation, less student to student interaction, less paper/pen writing.
ReplyDeleteAccording to web site expert, Kelsley Sherwood the tern “cursive” has 823,000 global monthly searches. At least there is interest out there!
ReplyDeleteIris Hatfield
New American Cursive Penmanship Program