How to Help Your Child With Handwriting
Categories: US Education News
Most parents today likely learned to write first in print, then cursive and finally – maybe years after those skills were in place – on a computer. Today, with students as young as kindergarten working on devices in the classroom, that sequence looks different.In our digital age, it makes sense for schools to incorporate typing and touchscreens into the day. Yet experts say handwriting is a fundamental skill that contributes to literacy. Further, it’s a skill that may have gotten lost – or at least deprioritized – during remote learning. And even with schools back in session, much of the technology that was implemented in response to the pandemic remains. According to an EdWeek Research Center survey, 84% of teachers said that elementary schools in their district had at least one device per child by March 2021. Lisa Fiore, a professor and chair of the education department at Lesley University, says writing by hand activates parts of the brain that aren’t used while passively watching something, typing on a keyboard or even tracing letters. Fiore also notes that as children learn to read and write, their brains begin to group together different categories of information and understand their meaning. She points out that four different characters – uppercase and lowercase in print and cursive – can represent a single letter. “We somehow learn to recognize they’re all the same category, the letter A,” she says. This categorizing is part of the process of letter recognition, and later, reading. Writing letters on paper further develops and encodes new neural connections, which helps with future recognition of these letters, Fiore explains. “The more we have these opportunities to open our brain up through these stimulating types of activities, the better.”“I do feel like children are being expected to be able to produce capital letters, lowercase letters, certainly by age 4,” she says, which is before some children have the fine motor skills necessary to accomplish this. “We need to try to remind ourselves … to calibrate our expectations with human development.”And kids with dysgraphia or other learning differences that make handwriting difficult may need special accommodations, experts say – including being able to work on computers. Teachers in the early grades aren’t only looking at a child’s ability to hold a pencil and write their name, according to Ann Walsh, a kindergarten teacher at the Roger Wellington Elementary School in Belmont, Massachusetts. “We also look at fine motor strength in other activities,” she wrote in an email, “such as using tweezers, picking up small pieces, and the ability to draw a person with at least five body parts.”Helping children think about handwriting as an everyday, fun activity instead of a chore is an approach that Fiore encourages as well. Pointing out letters or words while out on a walk or a drive can help build kids' interest. When outside, they can practice forming letters in the sand, mud or snow, or by arranging leaves and rocks – all strategies that provide a tangible experience a keyboard won’t.Giving children notebooks in the grocery story and copying the letters they see on labels is another strategy Fiore recommends. “They can be little word detectives,” she says.