Week in Class: Week Seven 2013 from Cursive to Keyboarding
This week, I’ve been thinking about writing. The process of writing that happens in the brain, how that is translated into a fine-motor activity to express those thoughts, and how to do this effectively with students.
With the switch-over to Common Core, I’m doing my assessment in English, Social Studies, and Language Arts based on writing, and eschewing most multiple choice test. We’ve had a strong writing practice at my site, so my kids can write, but few can do so in cursive. Although cursive was not eliminated until the Common Core adoption, I now have students who not only can’t write in cursive, they can’t read it. Fortunately I “print” in a modified version of D’Nealian script which is pretty easy to read. I went into sixth grade with awful penmanship, and great academic grades, but under the guidance of my sixth grade teacher I left with mediocre academic grades, but some killer cursive writing. On the whole, I would have preferred to have learned a bit more to prepare for
