Want Smart Kids? Make Sure They Learn to Do This
There's a brain-building skill schools are teaching less and less.
If you have kids in school, how much time do they spend learning cursive handwriting? Probably not much, especially if they're beyond first grade. The Common Core standards dominating education these days only call for teaching legible handwriting, and only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, students spend their time learning to use keyboards.
That might seem like a good thing. Mastering computers and technology are the make-or-break skills of the 21st century, after all. But a growing body of scientific evidence seems to show that the all the older people lamenting the death of penmanship are on to something. Whether or not they actually do much writing by hand in later life, learning to write by hand and do it well--in cursive as well as print--has measurable benefits for kids' brains.
Here are just a few:
1. Children who learn to hand write also learn to read better.
"Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information," writes psychologist and author Maria Konnikova in an article in The New York Times. And many people, children and adults alike, have experienced the ironic phenomenon where writing something down stores it in your memory so that you no longer need the note you've just written. It works best if you write whatever it is by hand.
2. Writing cursive activates a particular part of your brain.
Recent research has shown that typing, printing letters, and writing them in cursive active three different portions of the brains. For your children to have fully active brains, they should do all three.
3. It increases creativity.
A study at the University of Washington showed that children who compose text by hand rather than on a keyboard not only wrote more quickly but also more ideas as a result. And what type of handwriting you use does matter. The College Board found that students who wrote the essay portion of their SAT tests in cursive did slightly better than those who printed their letters.
4. They learn fine motor skills.
Classes that teach children fine motor skills and how to use our incredibly complex Want Smart Kids? Make Sure They Learn to Do This | Inc.com:
