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The Literacy How Professional Learning Series translates the latest reading research into how-to instructional practices. Based on the current and comprehensive Literacy How reading model, the Series draws upon the authors' decades of expertise and experience working with thousands of general and special education teachers. Organized for the busy educator who may be trying to find specific information, as well as for the professional seeking deeper understanding of literacy instruction and learning, the Series emphasizes Pre-K-3 conceptual and skill development. Teachers of older emerging or struggling readers will also find these tools useful.

"What Gillis and Eberhardt accomplish here is a rare feat. They blend a deep and complex understanding of the research concerning syntax with lessons teachers can immediately implement in their classrooms. Using an array of scaffolded activities that are at once hands-on, interactive, engaging, and accessible, this resource is essential for any teacher who is serious about developing an understanding of sentences in young children."

William Van Cleave, W.V.C.ED, Educational Consultant and Author, Writing Matters

Syntax: Knowledge to Practice is for any educator who's wondered:
*How is grammar related to syntax?
*How does syntax (sentence-level skills) instruction improve text comprehension and written expression?
*Why should syntax be taught in the context of writing?
*How should syntactic awareness be taught?
*Why teach meaning links to improve text cohesion?

The Literacy How Professional Learning Series includes four Knowledge to Practice books: Phonemic Awareness and Phonics, Vocabulary, Syntax, and Comprehension.

Each title in the series includes:

*Relevant Research-The research basis for that domain of literacy development presented against the backdrop of the Chall's stages of reading development, with key research points presented in a bullet-point style
*Knowledge for Effective Instruction-Background knowledge and the principles that guide instruction for that domain
*Activities for Instruction and Informal Assessment-A collection of evidence-based activities written in an objective-driven format for that component of literacy instruction (with access to printable versions)
*Text Selection Skills Analyses-Stage-specific text selections (i.e., predictable, code-emphasis, and authentic) illustrate using text to advance skill application
*Appendix-Recommended resources for content and more in depth information referenced in the book.

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Syntax Knowledge to Practice (Literacy How Professional Learning Series)

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The Literacy How Professional Learning Series translates the latest reading research into how-to instructional practices. Based on the current and comprehensive Literacy How reading model, the Series draws upon the authors' decades of expertise and experience working with thousands of general and...

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Padlet on Sytax and Sentence Level Instruction

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Padlet on Sytax and Sentence Level Instruction

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How to HOLD A PENCIL!! - (Easy for Kids!) - with Ally the Alligator

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Handwriting in a Modern World: Why it Matters & What To Do About It

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Handwriting in a Modern World: Why it Matters & What To Do About It

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Sister Bernadette's Quirky History and the Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences

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Sister Bernadette's Quirky History and the Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences

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Kitty Burns Florey (Author), Becky Kraemer

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Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences

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Amazon.com: Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences: 0884402741071: Florey, Kitty Burns, Kraemer, Becky: Books

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One, Two, Double I do for double the last letter

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One, Two, Double I do for double the last letter

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Activities & Days Out / 13 May, 2024 / Nanny Anita

When I was at school, I wish that there had been more little sayings to help remember spelling rules. The only one I knew was, "i before e, except after c." Now that I am older, I keep coming across new ones that I now use with my charges. The one that I will be sharing today is "1 2 double I do, 1 2 3 no doubling for me".

Make sure that you follow my English activities on Pinterest for more ideas. Don't forget to save the pin for later.

So, what is this ~1 2 double I do, 1 2 3 no doubling for me" for? Well, it is to help children learn when they need to double the last letter of a word before adding an ending like or.

Take a word that you want to add or to and look to the last vowel eg the word run. I start at the U and count on to the end. In this instance there are only 2 letters; the U and the N, so I double the last letter before adding the ending. Which would mean you would get running/runner.

Let's take another word - talk. If I count on from the A it would be 3 (the A, L, and K), so I wouldn't double the last letter. It would be talking/talked.

There are other rules that you can remember for when you double the last letter.

1. The word should be one syllable.

2. Have a short vowel sound.

3. End in a consonant.

Which is great to remember, but the rhyme is easier to remember, at least it is for me as a dyslexic.

Before leaving you with this, let's have a look at just one more word - scream. Looking at those 3 rules, it only fits 2 of them. It is one syllable and ends in a consonant. However, if you use the rhyme and start at the E (because that is the beginning of the vowel sound) then you would get to 3. Which means no need to double to m.

Hopefully, this little trick will help your little ones with their spellings.

If you liked this "1 2 double I do, 1 2 3 no doubling for me" then be sure to check out my homemade boggle game and phonic finder game.
Pin for later:

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"1 2 Double I Do.." Rhyme For When To Double The Last Letter

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Every wonder if there was an easier way to get children to learn when to double the last letters of words. Try this "1 2 double I do" rhyme

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Don't Neglect their Handwriting

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An Introduction to the Simple View of Writing

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An Introduction to the Simple View of Writing

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Murray/Beverine-Curry - An Introduction to a Simple View of Writing

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Exploring the relationship between letter recognition and handwriting in early literacy development.

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Exploring the relationship between letter recognition and handwriting in early literacy development.

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The Writing Revolution (TWR) Six Major Principles_

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Is handwriting causally related to learning to write?

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Is handwriting causally related to learning to write?

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High-tech companies are seeking to capitalize on the power of handwriting, but there are other reasons to value the practice, says UW educational psychology professor Virginia Berninger.

"Writing is the way we learn what we're thinking," said Berninger, who studies the effect of handwriting on the human brain. "The handwriting, the sequencing of the strokes, engages the thinking part of the mind."

Berninger was recently interviewed for a CBS This Morning story about how tech companies are reviving the art of handwriting in a digital age. Microsoft's Surface Pro 3 tablet allows users to write with a digital pen, and Austin, Texas-based year-old startup MailLift uses both human and robot handwriters to produce handwritten letters for clients.

The value of handwriting has been a topic of some debate in academic circles. The Common Core standards adopted in most states call for teaching children legible handwriting in kindergarten and first grade only, after which the focus is on keyboarding skills.

But several states, including California, Massachusetts, North Carolina and South Carolina, have recently moved to make cursive instruction mandatory. Some psychologists, neuroscientists and researchers including Berninger say there's an important connection between handwriting and learning. Children taught to write learn to read earlier, generate ideas more easily and have a better ability to retain information, they say.

In a five-year study of Seattle children in grades one through five, Berninger found that printing, cursive writing and using a keyboard each use related but different brain functions - underscoring that writing is a complex undertaking that draws on many neurological processes.

"Handwriting requires the production of a letter form, stroke by stroke," Berninger said in the CBS interview. "The act of producing something supports perception. So we need to output in order to improve our ability to process what we input from the environment."

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High-tech companies are seeking to capitalize on the power of handwriting, but there are other reasons to value the practice, says UW educational psychology professor Virginia Berninger. "Writing is the way we learn what we're thinking," said Berninger, who studies the effect of handwriting on the human brain.

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Rex Barks Diagramming sentences made easy

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Rex Barks Diagramming sentences made easy

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Phyllis Davenport (Author), Lisa Vandamme (Introduction)

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Rex Barks: Diagramming Sentences Made Easy

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Rex Barks: Diagramming Sentences Made Easy [Davenport, Phyllis, Vandamme, Lisa] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Rex Barks: Diagramming Sentences Made Easy

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PPTX to go along with the cursive booklet that comes with the 3rd-grade program. Instructions are in Grade 3, Unit 1

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Amplify CKLA Cursive Program Teaching Slide Deck Master

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The Writing Revolution - Empower teachers to help students

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By training educators in The Hochman Method©, The Writing Revolution (TWR) aims to help all students become proficient writers, readers, and critical thinkers.

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The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades

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Amazon.com: The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades (Audible Audio Edition): Judith C. Hochman, Natalie Wexler, Doug Lemov - foreword, Margaret Strom, Gildan Media: Books

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Teaching Students to be Effective Writers

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Teaching Students to be Effective Writers

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Structured Literacy Interventions: Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties, Grades K-6 (The Guilford Series on Intensive Instruction)

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Structured Literacy Interventions: Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties, Grades K-6 (The Guilford Series on Intensive Instruction) [Spear-Swerling, Louise] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Structured Literacy Interventions: Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties, Grades K-6 (The Guilford Series on Intensive Instruction)

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Reading & Writing for K-8 | Nancy Fetzer's Literacy Connections

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Nancy Fetzer travels across the United States providing staff development for districts and schools. When Nancy conducts professional development at school sites, she demonstrates the techniques and...

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The latest edition of this perennial favorite contains an additional 150 annotations of picture books published between 1998 and 2004. The new annotations include many books suitable for use with young adult readers and listeners, indicated with a 'YA' coding. As in the past, the descriptions are arranged by trait. Each of the traits has sample lesson plans for immediate classroom use, including the recently added 'Presentation' trait. If you have started using the 6+1 Trait Writing system in your classroom, you will find Picture Books an invaluable resource. 6th edition.

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Picture Books: An Annotated Bibliography with Activities for Teaching Writing

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The latest edition of this perennial favorite contains an additional 150 annotations of picture books published between 1998 and 2004. The new annotations include many books suitable for use with young adult readers and listeners, indicated with a 'YA' coding. As in the past, the descriptions are...

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Inspire students to develop as writers in the first grade classroom with these engaging and creative writing lessons. This classroom-tested resource shows positive results in students' writing and simplifies the planning of writing instruction. It contains detailed information on how to establish and manage daily Writer's Workshop and includes consistent, structured instruction to encourage students to actively participate in the writing process. Specific lessons to help students develop the traits of quality writing are also included. This resource develops college and career readiness skills and is aligned to today's standards.

About Shell Education
Rachelle Cracchiolo started the company with a friend and fellow teacher. Both were eager to share their ideas and passion for education with other classroom leaders. What began as a hobby, selling lesson plans to local stores, became a part-time job after a full day of teaching, and eventually blossomed into Teacher Created Materials. The story continued in 2004 with the launch of Shell Education and the introduction of professional resources and classroom application books designed to support Teacher Created Materials curriculum resources. Today, Teacher Created Materials and Shell Education are two of the most recognized names in educational publishing around the world.

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Getting to the Core of Writing: Essential Lessons for Every First Grade Student

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Amazon.com: Getting to the Core of Writing: Essential Lessons for Every First Grade Student: 9781425809157: Richard Gentry, Jan McNeel, Vickie Wallace-Nesler: Books

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The Reading Strategies Book made the New York Times Best Seller List by making it simpler to match students' needs to high-quality instruction. Now, in The Writing Strategies Book, Jen Serravallo does the same, collecting 300 of the most effective strategies to share with writers, and grouping them beneath 10 crucial goals.

"You can think of the goals as the what , "writes Jen, "and the strategies as the how ." From composing with pictures all the way to conventions and beyond, you'll have just-right teaching, just in time. With Jen's help you'll:

develop individual goals for every writer

give students step-by-step strategies for writing with skill and craft

coach writers using prompts aligned to a strategy

present mentor texts that support a genre and strategy

adjust instruction to meet individual needs with Jen's Teaching Tips

demonstrate and explain a writing move with her Lesson Language

learn more with Hat Tips to the work of influential teacher-authors.

She even offers suggestions for stocking your writing center, planning units of study, celebrating student writing, and keeping records.

Whether you use Writing Workshop, 6+1 Traits, Daily 5's "Work on Writing," a scripted writing program, the writing exercises in your basal, or any other approach, you'll discover a treasure chest of ways to work with whole classes, small groups, or individual writers.

"I am convinced that helping kids to articulate clear goals for their work," writes Jen Serravallo, "and supporting them with strategies and feedback to accomplish those goals, makes a huge difference." With The Writing Strategies Book you can make that kind of difference with your writers every day.

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The Writing Strategies Book: Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Writers

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Amazon.com: The Writing Strategies Book: Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Writers: 9780325078229: Serravallo, Jennifer: Books

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Barry Lane's bestselling After THE END helped teachers see revision in a whole new light, and inspired a generation of students to not only embrace revision, but to realize that writing is revision. The long-awaited second edition keeps Barry's humorous and endearing tone and updates his ideas, lessons, and activities for teaching writing with heart, even in the Common Core era. New material in this edition includes:

Rediscover why Barry Lane is a beloved and inspirational teacher, writer, and storyteller. And "after the end," know that it's really only a great new beginning for your students and their writing.

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After THE END, Second Edition: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision

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Amazon.com: After THE END, Second Edition: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision: 9780325077918: Lane, Barry: Books

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Craft Lessons Second Edition: Teaching Writing K-8

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Amazon.com: Craft Lessons Second Edition: Teaching Writing K-8: 9781571107060: Fletcher, Ralph, Portalupi, JoAnn: Books

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Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom

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1999 Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom (P) by Katie Wood Ray ***ISBN-13: 9780814158166 ***316 Pages

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Handwriting Instruction for students with Dysgraphia

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Handwriting Instruction for students with Dysgraphia

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Teaching Students with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia

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Teaching Students with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia

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How can teachers provide effective literacy instruction for students with learning differences-while meeting the needs of all students in the class? Finally, a single accessible textbook answers that question for every Kâ€"12 educator. The only teacher training text to cover the three learning disabilities that require differentiated instruction-dysgraphia, dyslexia, and oral and written language learning disability (OWL LD)-this book prepares educators to teach students with learning differences in explicit, reflective, and intellectually engaging ways.

Ginger Berninger, a seasoned researcher and former teacher, partners with 40-year teacher and teacher trainer veteran Beverly Wolf for a one-of-a-kind text that gives readers the best of both worlds: critical insights from scientific studies and lessons learned from actual teaching experience. Educators will get the research-based guidance they'll need to

organize their classrooms, routines, and lesson plans through differentiated instruction to meet instructional needs of students with learning differences and their peers

improve every aspect of students' literacy, including reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills, by providing both oral and written language instruction

create a positive learning environment that promotes intellectual engagement

apply a specific framework for instruction that helps students overcome working memory inefficiencies and fluency problems

consider how preservice teacher education and inservice professional development can prepare teachers for differentiated instruction in general education

Throughout the book, relevant research findings from diverse fields-including genetics, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and education-show teachers the why behind the how. And the extensive instructional guidelines, applicable across school settings and specific curricula, offer innovative approaches to practice that will help teachers successfully meet the needs of individual students. An essential part of every teacher's preparation, this text ensures that educators are ready to deliver effective, individually tailored instruction to students with dysgraphia, dyslexia, and oral and written language disabilities.

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teaching students with dyslexia and dysgraphia: lessons from teaching and science

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special education - communicative disorders

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education / special education / communicative disorders

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education / special education / learning disabilities

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education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

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special education - communicative disorders

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education / special education / communicative disorders

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education / special education / learning disabilities

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education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

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Teaching Students with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia: Lessons from Teaching and Science

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Teaching Students with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia: Lessons from Teaching and Science [Berninger Ph.D., Virginia W., Wolf M.Ed., Beverly J.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Teaching Students with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia: Lessons from Teaching and Science

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Instruction and Assessment for struggling writers

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Instruction and Assessment for struggling writers

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This unique book focuses on how to provide effective instruction to K-12 students who find writing challenging, including English language learners and those with learning disabilities or language impairments. Prominent experts illuminate the nature of writing difficulties and offer practical suggestions for building students' skills at the word, sentence, and text levels. Topics include writing workshop instruction; strategies to support the writing process, motivation, and self-regulation; composing in the content areas; classroom technologies; spelling instruction for diverse learners; and assessment approaches. Every chapter is grounded in research and geared to the real-world needs of inservice and preservice teachers in general and special education settings.

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Instruction and Assessment for Struggling Writers: Evidence-Based Practices (Challenges in Language and Literacy)

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This unique book focuses on how to provide effective instruction to K-12 students who find writing challenging, including English language learners and those with learning disabilities or language impairments. Prominent experts illuminate the nature of writing difficulties and offer practical su...

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Rationale

The kindergarten teacher begins interactive writing in her class by writing "Today is ..." on a piece of chart paper. She asks for a volunteer to take the pen and write the day, which she has written on a sentence strip and clipped to the top of the chart. Michael raises his hand and the teacher offers him the pen. He comes forward proudly to take it and carefully starts to write "M" for Monday.

The teacher shares the writing experience with young students on chart paper or a whiteboard that is large enough for the whole class to see. Students participate by giving the teacher ideas and also by "taking the pen" and writing words, phrases, or sentences with the teacher's guidance. Older students can participate in shared and collaborative writing as well (Button, Johnson, & Fergerson, 1996; McCarrier, Pinnell, & Fountas, 2000).

Reading literature is an excellent way to initiate interactive writing in the class, and the teacher can continue using literature as the class does interactive writing with any new book that is read throughout the year. The teacher can begin with what is happening that day in class, or a holiday, or a special event in the school. Topics could also be any idea of interest to the students or any interesting event that has occurred: a new class pet, a special activity, a guest speaker that visited the class, a field trip the class went on, a change in the weather (e.g., it rained, snowed, or it was sunny for a change), or something special happened to a child (e.g., they took a trip, have a family visitor, or participated in an after school activity).

This strategy could be modeled on the first day of school, and it could continue to be used throughout the school year daily or several times a day, with other books read aloud during the week or other topics of interest to the students. Mini-lessons can be used to teach writing conventions in the authentic writing context of interactive writing.

Strategy

Read literature that introduces a topic for discussion and interactive writing and do mini-lessons on the conventions of writing as the need for them occurs during interactive writing. For example, for kindergarten, model how to (1) capitalize the first letter or the first word in a sentence and (2) indent the first sentence of a paragraph using the title as the first sentence.
The first day of school is ...
Ask students for ideas to complete the sentence. Remind them of the ideas they shared in response to the reader response questions and prompts. When the class agrees on how to complete the sentence, ask for a volunteer to come to the chart and take the pen to complete the sentence. If a child volunteers and is not yet writing, take dictation for them and write the words as they speak them. If a child is not yet writing but knows the alphabet, spell the words letter-by-letter as they write or write the words in pencil and have the child trace over them with a marking pen. Continue writing the story this way. Ask the students for ideas and for volunteers to take the pen.

Other mini-lessons on the conventions of writing can be modeled during interactive writing as they occur in context.

Older students can practice interactive writing by sharing the pen and collaborating with each other on letters, memos, invitations, or any kind of narrative story, as well as on reports in the content areas.

Grade-level modifications

K-2nd Grade

Read aloud a book about school. Off to Kindergarten by Tony Johnson can be used for a kindergarten class. In this rhyming text, a little boy names all of the things he wants to bring to school on the first day of kindergarten, from a sandbox to a chair for his stuffed bear, until his mother assures him that his teacher will have everything he needs. For first or second grade students, use Hamsters, Shells, and Spelling Bees: School Poems in a collection edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins (2008) in his I Can Read poetry anthology series. Lead a discussion using aesthetic reader response questions and prompts: How do you feel about the first day of school? How do you feel about school? What do you wish will happen in school this year?

Tell students they will all share their ideas about school through interactive writing. Students can sit on the rug and form a semicircle facing an easel with a piece of paper on it. Ask students for title suggestions for the piece of interactive writing (e.g., "Today at School," "School," "The First Day of School," or another title that emerges from the discussion of the book). Discuss the title choice with the students and either write the title at the top of the chart paper or whitcboard or ask for a child to volunteer to take the pen (marking pen) and write the title. Provide scaffolding to support the student writer with spelling, capitalization, punctuation, or other writing conventions.

For days other than the first day of school, here arc some topics and sentence starters:

"Today is Monday" (or any other day of the week)

"Today is President's Day" (or any other holiday)

"It's a Rainy Day" (or any other weather)

"We're Going to the Zoo" (or any other field trip)

Plus Technology

Through the use of a Smart Board, take dictation and project students' interactive writing on a screen. Revisions can be made to the writing as students watch the changes made on the screen, and mini-lessons may be modeled as well. The interactive writing can also be in the form of an e-mail message that can be sent anywhere-to another teacher's classroom, other school personnel (e.g., the principal or the librarian), or to family members with e-mail access.

Recommended children's books

3rd Grade-5th Grade

Students can write interactively in response to a read aloud book such as Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (Blume, 1972). Letters can be written interactively by the whole class to someone who visited the class as a guest speaker, to the author of a book they enjoyed, to another class to join them for an activity, to the principal or other school staff in appreciation for something, to a student who is at home for medical reasons, or to the editor of a newspaper on an issue of concern to students. Students can also form groups and write stories, narratives, or short reports in the content areas interactively.

Students can form more than one group but agree to write on the same topic. For example, in response to a chapter book like Ramona the Pest (Cleary, 1968), more advanced primary students could plan to write their own memoir of school patterned after the book. They could identify a main character together but write separate chapters on different topics such as friends, recess, favorite school subjects, least favorite school subjects, or most embarrassing moments. The groups could meet periodically as a whole and discuss the continuity among the chapters and revise accordingly.

Writing conventions appropriate for Grades 3 through 5, or as needed, can be taught in mini-lessons during interactive writing.

Indenting paragraphs

Punctuation: Hyphens, colons, parentheses, or commas in a series of adjectives

Strong verbs, specific nouns, and colorful adjectives and adverbs

Complete and incomplete sentences

Contractions

Pluralization rules

Plural possessives

Quotation marks and underlining in published titles

Homonyms

Onomatopoeia

Recommended children's books

Differentiated instruction

English language learners

Interactive writing makes the writing process visual to the whole class, and English learners who are not yet writing can contribute by illustrating the interactive writing. Interactive writing is context-embedded instruction that taps the prior knowledge of students. It also involves social interaction and cooperation among students. If an English learner is not yet writing, they could "hold the space" between words as another student or the teacher writes the words.

English learners see writing modeled and can copy sentences into their own writing in journals or stories. Use the interactive writing strategy with small groups of English learners, using primary language support as well.

Needs-based groups can be formed and can write interactively in a variety of ways (e.g., responding to a book read aloud or any previously read text, or writing conventions specifically needed by the group).

Struggling students

Students participate by verbally sharing ideas for interactive writing. Take dictation for students, either by writing their ideas for them or by writing them in pencil first and having the student write over them with a marking pen.

Do interactive writing in a small group of three to five struggling readers and writers while other students write in journals or write stories. The same procedure would be used, but each child would have more opportunity to participate and there would be more time to assess and differentiate instruction for each one.

Assessment

Initialing Interactive Writing: Show each child how to initial their writing on the chart. This provides a record of their progress in writing and a means to identify strengths and needs of each child over time. In small groups or writing conferences, provide mini-lessons for each child's assessed needs.

Interactive Writing Record: Use a loose-leaf notebook to keep a record of each child's writing during interactive writing. Word process and print out a facsimile of the form that follows, 3-hole punch it, and include it in the notebook. Use alphabet tabs for last names, and put each child's record under the letter of their last name. Periodically, go through the interactive writing pieces and note the following for each child on their sheet of paper:

Resources

McCarrier, A., Pinnell, G. S., and Fountas, I. C. (2000). Interactive writing: How language and literacy come together. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann

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Interactive writing makes the writing process visual to the whole class. Reading literature is an excellent way to initiate interactive writing in the class, and the teacher can continue using literature as the class does interactive writing with any new book that is read throughout the year.

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The early years

As these examples show, in the early elementary years it is the child's narrative voice that must find its way into the classroom in order for students to gain confidence and competence in reading and writing. Vicki Spandel (1996) describes voice as the "writer coming through the writing. It is the heart and soul of writing, the magic, the wit, the feeling, the life and breath. ... At the primary level, voice is first noticeable in speaking, oral storytelling, and art". By building on these competencies, teachers can help children develop their writing voice as well.

Looking at, talking about, and reflecting on artwork also help children develop aesthetic sensitivity. They learn that art consists of symbols that communicate ideas, experiences, and feelings that can be shared (Honigman & Bhavnagri, 1998). In a thematic study of reading and great artists, second-graders in Jane Kolakowski's class listen to and read stories about artists' lives and work. In their projects, children develop and refine the visual senses and extend their understanding of story elements by first discussing and exploring paintings, and then imagining that they can enter a painting. One seven-year-old wrote (using developmental spelling) the following in response to the painting Stafford Heights by Gari Melchers:

I smell grain in the field. not that many houses are around. There are many trees. It is sunny and there is a dirt path. There's a field on a hill. It is bright outside the air is sweet the trees smell lik pinecones. There are no flowers here. My mouth waters when I tast sweet graps. You can not hear the birds singing. You can feel a breeze. You can't see anyone outside. The wind plays tug-of-war with my hair (Kolakowski, 1995).

Kolakowski comments that the insight and maturity expressed in the metaphor of the last sentence is brought out by the child's interaction with art:

The study verifies for me the research of Elliot Eisner (1992) in which he writes that the arts' contribution is its offer to everyone of an ability to feel and participate in the lives of others. Art is communication with oneself and others. Art unites the rational and the emotional. ... I want my students to feel, to dream, and to know that they have something to share with the world. This is the process that art study begins.

"Writing floats on a sea of talk" (Britton, 1970)

Learning to communicate well in a number of symbol systems, including art and oral and written language, and learning to participate in the lives of others through these symbol systems, are critical competencies for both children and adults. Researcher Anne Dyson (1987) found in her studies of young children's collaborative story writing, "the most elaborate verbal stories and the most flexible manipulation of narrative time and space occurred, not in the texts themselves, but in the children's talk". Elementary teacher Merle Hom (2004) writes that she struggled with how to bring writing to life for her students. She was introduced to the writer's notebook while participating in the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University and that helped her to make writing relevant to her children's lives. She also found that sharing writing in a collaborative classroom is helpful for all students, and critical for some:

Several of my students also discovered that they like to write together in pairs or threes. They brainstorm together, agree on what to write, and then each one writes about the topic in their own writer's notebook. They say the activity doubles their ideas and that their best ideas come when writing together.

First-grade teacher Nancy Csak (2002) found that the topics students told about during storytelling time were often the same ones they wrote about in their daily journals:

Children who previously claimed they couldn't think of anything to write would often light up when reminded that they could write down the story they told that morning. They began to see a stronger connection to writing as they realized that anything spoken could be written down.

"Many educators have believed that personal storytelling can serve as an effective bridge into schooling and early literacy," say researchers Miller and Mehler (1994). The enduring popularity of "show and tell" is a testament to the power of sharing personal experiences in the primary classroom. In the article, "Sharing Lives: Reading, Writing, Talking, and Living in a First-grade Classroom," the authors describe a classroom in which "narratives - personal and public, self-constructed and constructed by others - played a central role in the building of this community and in its continued life" (Galda, Bisplinghoff, Pellegrini, & Stahl, 1995). By bringing their lives into the classroom through oral and written personal narratives, children were able to:

1. Connect their home lives to their school lives, blurring the distinction between home and school, and affirm the value and importance that the individual child had in the classroom

2. Find ways of getting to know each other and build their community

3. Offer ideas for the reading and writing they did in the classroom (Galda et al., 1995)

Children's stories provide valuable insight into what they think about and how they interpret their experiences. Also, stories are an area of strength for many young children, including those from backgrounds that do not offer many experiences with reading and writing. Geertz (2000) concludes, "It is not so much a matter of providing something the child hasn't got as enabling something the child already has: the desire to make sense of self and others ... ". Teachers agree that children are interested in personal storytelling, participating frequently and avidly. Helping children and young adults to see their own experiences and stories as valued and important can build students' confidence and competence in reading, writing, and critical thinking - competencies that are necessary for the higher level literacy skills needed in today's complex society.

Juneau elementary teacher Mimi Walker notes that writing about themselves and their environment "makes the work relevant. There's nothing more important to young children than themselves and what surrounds them. Writing about their own and their family's experiences validates them" and, when they see that other people think their work is important too, "that just makes the children feel great".

Strategies for young learners

Invented spelling. Encouraging the use of invented or developmental spelling is a strategy that builds both phonemic awareness and phonics knowledge, and offers teachers a window into children's understanding of print/sound relationships (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). When children are able to express their thoughts while using their best phonetic spelling, they can focus on using language to communicate. Because thinking is, of course, crucial to good writing, both writing and thinking benefit when young children are encouraged to concentrate on the content of writing rather than the form or mechanics of writing (Sweet, 1993). In Dancing with the Pen (Ministry of Education, 1992), the authors explain: "Allowing children to attempt spelling enables them to use vocabulary from their oral language which then flows on into their writing. Spelling is functional - it enables writers to express meaning. It is therefore, a tool for writing, not a barrier to the writing process".

Language experience. For young children, writing is often an arduous task. A young writer must be able to physically manipulate a pencil and reproduce print from memory in order to say what he or she has to say (Cooper, 1993). Although learning to write independently is an important goal in the primary years, dictating stories eliminates the necessity to learn everything at once; children's emerging narrative voice can be temporarily freed from the constraints of the mechanics of writing. Dictating stories to an attentive adult can help children develop their storytelling ability and develop an understanding of how sound maps onto print.

In this approach, often referred to as the language experience approach (LEA), teachers act as scribes, writing children's words as they dictate them, listening carefully for the narrative thread, and helping children clarify their thoughts. As these stories are reread by the author and his or her classmates, children begin to match the remembered words with the printed ones. Language experience activities integrate all aspects of literacy: speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and are particularly effective for children learning English as a second language.

When adults write down children's stories as children tell them, children learn that:

What I think I can say and discuss with others

What I say can be written and shared with others

What I write can be read by myself and others

What we read can be thought about, shared, and discussed

In addition to writing original stories, students and teachers can share an experience, such as a visit to a museum or a beach. Together, they discuss the experience, and the teacher writes children's observations and descriptions on the board or chart pack. After writing several sentences, the teacher asks the students to read what they have all just written together. It is easy to see how these activities help to build the classroom community, as well as literacy skills.

Language experience activities can be helpful for older students who struggle with writing. During a project that sought to incorporate the culture and language of the Native American students in Tulalip, Washington, teacher David Cort worked one-to-one with a student who was on an IEP and struggled with reading and writing. Cort and the student sat down together and thought through what the child had to say about the canoe journey, the focus of the project. "At first, he was very terse and couldn't think of anything, but as we worked together he realized he really had a lot to say about his experience on the canoe journey and he was very excited about saying it," says Cort.

Cort acted as his scribe, writing down the student's dictated story. They talked about revision strategies while they worked, eventually reaching a point where the student felt very proud of his writing. Then the student selected photographs of the local area, put them into a slide show using Macromedia Flash software, and recorded himself reading the essay, which resulted in a polished presentation.

Researcher Timothy Shanahan (1988) concludes:

LEA gives children the opportunity to see the process through which ideas are translated into text. It provides basic information about technical aspects of writing (e.g., spaces between words, directionality, what to do at the end of a line); it demonstrates the planning, drafting, and revision stages of writing; and it gives children valuable experience in the sustained monologue required in writing.

Finding time for language experience activities

Recording children's stories, just as they dictate them, is time consuming. How does a busy teacher provide the individual attention that is needed for these language-rich activities? "It's easy," says Ellen Fischer, half-time kindergarten teacher and half-time Title I teacher at Hermon Hutchins Elementary School in Valdez, Alaska. "You put the older kids to work mentoring the younger kids. Everybody is learning together." The goals for the kindergartners are to hone emerging reading and writing skills, phonemic awareness, and phonics knowledge. "But the larger picture is that kindergarten is where children learn to love reading, to be ready for first grade, and be dying to become readers and writers," Fischer notes.

"For the older kids, we want reading to be a positive experience, something you share with people. It's fun and social. And in the process of helping the younger kids, they also are practicing their reading and writing skills." Older students come into the morning kindergarten class two to three times per week, working with children on reading, writing, phonics games, and spelling, providing the individualized attention and support that many five-year-olds need and appreciate.

It is with writing that the older kids have become invaluable, engaging in shared and interactive writing with their younger classmates, whose writing skills are just beginning to emerge. The older students enjoy coming in so much that they like to come in and help when they have free time. "At first I was afraid that the older kids might be stigmatized by coming into the kindergarten room," notes Fischer. "So we worked in the library. Then they asked, 'How come we can't come into your room? We thought you'd let us sit on the rug and take off our shoes.' It doesn't matter what grade you're in, we all like to share stories. And they take responsibility; they come to work."

Every day, the kindergartners write in their journal. This is a free-write time when they write on a subject of their choice. The only requirements are that they write something and illustrate it. Some children write using invented spelling. Others want to get the spelling correct and want help with that. Some want to dictate the story to the older children. The older students act as scribes, writing down what the kindergartners say, and pointing to the letters and words as they write. They pay careful attention to the story, asking for clarification, and often making suggestions: Often the older children draw and write in the journals, with the permission of the younger ones. "It's a good collaborative effort and we encourage all of these approaches," says Fischer.

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Inviting Personal Narratives Into the Classroom

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As these examples show, in the early elementary years it is the child's narrative voice that must find its way into the classroom in order for students to gain confidence and competence in reading and writing. Vicki Spandel (1996) describes voice as the "writer coming through the writing.

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Morpheme Magic – Lessons to Build Morphological Awareness

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Teachers and students alike, will become captivated by words as they explore together the world of language and morphology, and build awareness of morphemes, the meaningful parts in words.

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Great resource for spelling/phonics instruction

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Great resource for spelling/phonics instruction

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Uncovering the Logic of English helps educators break the complex code of English with simple rules.

Award-winning author Denise Eide demonstrates the effectiveness of systematic phonics to develop a transformed understanding of high-frequency words, sight words, decodable words and irregular words.

Written in an engaging and easy-to-follow style, Uncovering the Logic of English sheds light on our society's literacy crisis and provides a wealth of reading and spelling tools to help any student succeed.

This book is suitable for teachers looking to expand their reading curriculum, adults struggling with spelling, English Language Learners who want to improve their pronunciation and parents teaching their children at home.

Uncovering the Logic of English challenges the notion that English is illogical by revealing the logical patterns underlying 98% of English words and explaining:

75 phonograms and 31 spelling rules that can be used to explain 98% of English words

How English words are formed and how this knowledge can revolutionize vocabulary development

That understanding the reasons behind English spelling prevents students from needing to guess

Grounded in the latest linguistic and reading research, Uncovering the Logic of English demonstrates why the phonogram approach, with accurate spelling rules, should be as foundational to our education system as 1 + 1 = 2.

What if the problem is not the language itself, but the rules we were taught? What if we could see the complexity of English as a powerful tool rather than a hindrance? - Denise Eide

Uncovering the Logic of English introduces the phonograms and rules that are taught in the Logic of English Foundations and Essentials series.

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This book helps educators have a better grasp of how to teach English and provide learners with an in-depth understanding of the English language.

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Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary and Spelling Instruction

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Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary and Spelling Instruction [Bear, Donald, Invernizzi, Marcia, Templeton, Shane, Johnston, Francine] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary and Spelling Instruction

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Spelling: Development, Disabilities, and Instruction [Moats, Louisa Cook] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Spelling: Development, Disabilities, and Instruction

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of assessment and instruction in today's classrooms. supplies K-12 educators with in-depth knowledge of the structure and function of language-fundamentals they need to deliver successful structured literacy instruction. Renowned literacy expert Louisa Cook Moats gives current and future teachers comprehensive, accurate, and accessible information on the underpinnings of language instruction, including: their students should be taught. Ideal for use in preservice courses and in-service professional development sessions, this essential textbook will give educators the strong foundation they need to teach language and reading skills to students with and without disabilities. Support your instruction with a complete package of online companion materials, including chapter quizzes, a sample syllabus/course outline, PowerPoints to accompany each chapter, PDF handouts for selected concepts, and a video demonstrating production of all the sounds in the English language. Learn more about the new edition! Speech to Print has been a bestselling, widely adopted textbook on explicit, high-quality literacy instruction. Now the anticipated third edition is here, fully updated with ten years of new research, a complete package of supporting materials, and expanded guidance on the how Speech to Print

Filling a critical gap in teacher preparation courses,

the history of the English language and its effect on spelling

English phonology, including speech sounds and their distinctive features

how print represents speech in English

the morphological aspects of words

syntax and its instruction

how meaning is conveyed with language

how
Through case studies, activities, recommended teaching principles, and close analysis of real-world student work samples, teachers will also receive invaluable insight into WHAT'S NEW:

New and expanded practical content on the how of language and reading instruction

New and updated chapter exercises

New faculty support materials

More on key topics like program and curricula selection, frameworks for instructional planning, and problem solving when students are slow to respond to intervention

More accessible, undergraduate-friendly tone and structure

Additional graphics to illustrate key concepts

NEW FACULTY SUPPORT MATERIALS!

Watch the webinar recording

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Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers

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Amazon - Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers: Moats Ed.D., Louisa Cook, Brady Ph.D., Dr. Susan: 9781681253305: Books

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The Science of Handwriting- Scientific American

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The Science of Handwriting- Scientific American

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I am writing this article in bold, retroexperimental fashion, using a technique found rarely in the modern publishing world: handwriting, using pen and paper, those dead-tree tools seen by technophiles as historical curiosities, like clay tablets or Remington typewriters.

Why do such a thing in a keystroke age? In part I do so because handwriting is becoming a marginal activity, in society and in my life. We type more than ever before, and it's not uncommon to meet people who have ceased writing by hand altogether, their scripts withering like vestigial limbs.

I can't shake the feeling that my thinking is different-more measured, more rich-when mediated by hand rather than machine. People whom I ask often tell similar stories. The bulk of their words are delivered by keyboard, but they still make lists, take notes, outline texts or compose their thoughts by hand. They, too, feel handwriting engages the mind differently.

The feeling alone is certainly unscientific. It could be an illusion or confounded by factors, such as the difficulty of checking e-mail on paper, that have nothing to with handwriting's cognitive properties. Skeptics might contend that modern children, weaned on keys and screens, will wield their devices to equal effect. As long as we write, what does it matter how?

So goes the conventional wisdom. Every other major millennial technological shift has occasioned hand-wringing concern: we worry about Internet addiction, friendships trivialized by social media, e-readers supplanting physical books, screens turning kids into stimulation junkies. Yet apart from writer Philip Hensher's lovely The Missing Ink, a book that plumbs handwriting's cultural history, the dwindling of this technology, central to civilization's rise, has gone largely unremarked.

As it turns out, only a few researchers have studied handwriting's relation to thought, and their findings are in early-draft form-but the draft suggests that us pen-clutching holdouts may be on to something. Pens and pencils do seem to engage our brain in a unique manner, especially as children. Whether these differences translate into nuances of adult thought is still unclear, and if you're looking for advice on whether a number-two pencil will best boost your brain, it doesn't exist. But society ought to be very careful about putting its pencils away for good.

Our Marvelous Hands

Given that writing is one of humanity's foundational achievements-Hammurabi's codes were not committed to memory, and Gutenberg could print only what was first handwritten-one might expect more scientific conclusiveness about its media. From the first modern writing studies in the 1970s until recently, researchers have focused on cognitive and linguistic aspects, such as revision strategies and memory. Brains mattered, not tools, nor the rest of our bodies. The medium was not the message.

"Researchers have been concerned with writing as a linguistic activity. It is, but it must also be accomplished in a material way," says Christina Haas, a professor in the University of Minnesota's writing studies department and editor of the journal Written Communication. In the late 1980s Haas found, to her surprise, that students seemed to do a better job of planning their writing by hand than by keyboard. It was a data point, not a conclusion; the study was small, and the students likely did not start typing during childhood, which would matter. Still, her result was intriguing.

"I thought, How can it be that the tool you use can influence what's happening in your brain?" Haas says. "I know this sounds simple, but it led me to the insight that people weren't talking about: it's the human body that intervenes between the tool and the brain." Central to that intervention are our hands, through which so many everyday interactions flow. (If you want to appreciate your hands anew, spend the next 15 minutes being mindful of their movements.) In a vision-centric society, hands tend to be overlooked, but their evolutionary importance is paramount.

Lucy, the australopithecine mother of our lineage, was not merely special because she stood upright but because doing so freed her hands. Over the next several million years these appendages gained exquisite versatility and precision, of use in crafting tools and also possibly in shaping language. Some researchers think gesture allowed language to evolve, imparting the representational richness necessary for syntax to arise. "That linkage between hand and mind is intimate," says anthropologist David F. Armstrong.

The importance of the hand-mind link is seen in developing children, for whom the ability to manipulate physical objects tracks uncannily with the acquisition of speech. It is also evident in the clinical literature, which contains many examples of patients with brain lesions that impair their handwriting also struggling to recognize letters by sight. For people who have trouble reading, tracing the outlines of letters with their fingers often helps.

"We use our hands to access our thoughts," says Virginia Berninger, an educational psychologist at the University of Washington. What our hands do with a keyboard is very different than with pen and paper. For most people, typing becomes automatic after a few months of instruction. Learning the precise geometries that make up handwritten characters, however, takes years. (The dominant hand is not alone, either. As interface expert Yves Guiard of Télécom ParisTech has shown, nondominant hands constantly and subtly adjust paper position just before letters are formed.) The geometries are so rich that forensic analysts take as axiomatic that no two people have the same script.

Visual feedback is also essential. Handwriting is messy in the dark. And that points to what literacy professor Anne Mangen of the University of Stavanger in Norway considers a central property of handwriting: it unifies hand, eye and attention at a single point in space and time. Typing on a keyboard, which Mangen calls "the abstraction of inscription," breaks the unity. The question is, Does it matter?

The Scientific Letter

The beginnings of an answer lie, appropriately, with letter perception. Seeing either handwritten or typed letters naturally stimulates visual activity, but the former also produces motor activity, although we remain physically motionless. At the neurological level, a scripted letter is both visual and physical.

Marieke Longcamp, a cognitive scientist at Aix-Marseille University in France, refers to this phenomenon as an embodiment of perception and has investigated its consequences in a series of experiments that test children on their ability to recognize letters, a task of deceptive simplicity to a literate adult. Discerning b and d or understanding that A and a are the same characters is only easy because we have practiced for so long.

When Longcamp trained children still learning the alphabet to write letters by hand, they more readily recognized the letters than when she taught them the appropriate keystrokes, as she described in a 2005 study. A year later Longcamp saw a similar pattern in adults, but with an interesting twist. Over several weeks she taught adults to handwrite or type unfamiliar Bengali letterforms. Immediately after training, handwriters and typers were equally adept at recognition tests. After several more weeks, though, dramatic differences in recall emerged. Letterform knowledge accumulated by hand persisted, whereas typed learning dissipated.

Longcamp attributes this difference to the motor activity that seeing handwritten letters triggers. Because reading a scrawled character seems to activate the neurological instructions for penning it, the mere act of reading the letter replays it anew in our mind. "This memory doesn't exist in the keyboard," Longcamp says.

Those studies are not definitive; they involved just a few dozen participants, and the inevitable caveats attend. Yet they fit into a continuum of complementary findings, the next of which come from cognitive neuroscientist Karin James of Indiana University Bloomington. James is interested in functional specialization, which is the way parts of the human brain are fine-tuned to process faces, colors and motion without conscious thought.

Letters also attain specialization, but unlike colors and motion they are almost certainly not evolutionarily hardwired. Instead, James surmises, letter specializations develop during childhood, through exposure to language, raising the question of whether different types of exposure affect specialization.

James observed people's brains as they looked at letters and letterlike shapes in a pair of experiments in 2008 and 2010. When they have been taught to write those forms by hand, activity in functionally specialized letter areas is greater than when they have learned the keystrokes. Moreover, as she described in a 2012 paper, seeing handwritten letters not only triggers the expected motor activity but even heightens activity in purely visual areas. Hands help us see.

James attributes this facility not to Longcamp's mental-letter-replay mechanisms but to the way our hands produce subtly differing letterforms with every iteration. Even a practiced writer rarely produces two identical letters, and the effect is more pronounced in children. As James describes it, child letterforms are still "noisy relative to the model" and in aggregate make up a mental library of the many variations a single letter can take.

Letter recognition is a fundament of reading. It is also crucial to spelling, an ability that predicts many high-level language skills, such as translating ideas into text or expressing concepts clearly. "If this process is different according to writing mode, it can affect the whole reading process," Longcamp says.

Such millisecond-level neurological processing can cross into real-world relevance, as the work of Berninger at the University of Washington reveals. Berninger led an exceptionally thorough, five-year-long study of 128 children as they learned to write. She and her colleagues tracked their subjects on various cognitive and academic measures, from how their fingers tapped in sequence to spelling ability, memory and communication skills.

Key to a 2009 publication emerging from this study were the serially coordinated finger movements, which renowned psychologist Karl Lashley proposed, in the mid-20th century, as a foundation for basic cognitive functions. In the 1990s they were shown to underlie handwriting as well. While performing them, students showed marked differences in brain activity usually related to language and working memory. The latter-one's capacity for keeping and organizing information in mind, such as an essay writer simultaneously grasping facts she intends to convey, her overall argument and a just completed sentence-is indispensable to complex reading and writing.

Outside the scanner, these activations in turn tracked with letter-forming ability, handwriting legibility and ultimately the students' fluency of expression. "It's legible, automatic handwriting, when you just ask kids to write the alphabet from memory, that was the single best predictor of not only spelling but the quality and amount they composed," Berninger says. She considers hands to be "the end organ of the language system."

The Next Chapter

Berninger emphasizes that her findings need to be replicated, but the studies consistently point to the importance for handwriting in child development. The message comes at an opportune time: the so-called Common Core standards, a set of guidelines issued in 2010 to unify state curricula in the U.S., has set off a national discussion about handwriting's place in school.

Much of the discussion involves cursive education, which went unmentioned in the standards, leading to its formal abandonment by Indiana and Florida. The ensuing backlash prompted eight states, including California and a chastened Indiana, to affirm cursive's importance. Cursive aside, the educational trend is nonetheless away from handwriting. It is taught less rigorously than in the past, and typing is ever more common in ever lower grades, a drift reflective of handwriting's dwindling in society at large. Kathleen S. Wright, handwriting product manager at Ohio-based education company Zaner-Bloser, says teachers often tell her about children who start school without ever having seen an adult write by hand.

"Everybody in the writing community says it's better to begin writing by hand," says behavioral scientist Thierry Olive of the University of Poitiers in France. "When you type, you don't have movement." Yet once students are old enough, can pens and pencils be dropped, like training wheels on the way to typing's 10-speed bicycle? On this question, research goes fuzzy. Writing in the adult sense is more than letterform and character recognition. It is a mentally recursive process, an ever shifting, feedback-looping interplay between thoughts and knowledge.

In some circumstances, the text-manipulating powers of word-processing programs seem to aid complex thought. The programs also offer a sheer speed that, for some people, ultimately feels more true to mind than handwriting. David Slomp, a literacy education instructor at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, thinks this automaticity is what matters: as long as the letters flow, keyboarding is just fine. And just as Stephen Peverly, an educational psychologist at Columbia University's Teachers College, can offer anecdotes about students swapping laptops for notebooks because they better remember handwritten notes, some studies suggest the opposite.

There is, however, one aspect of writing that hints at a unique role for hands. Writing also seems to have spatial properties, a dimension revealed in experiments on writing with distractions. Texts composed while writers trace shapes with one hand, for example, engaging their brain's spatial processes, are uniquely disorganized compared with texts composed with background noise flashing on a screen and contain fewer new ideas. Minds encode the relative locations of words and paragraphs, a blueprint of thought without which text may be less differentiated, a pile of beams rather than a scaffold.

Here, it seems, is a possible intersection for handwriting's physical aspects and higher-level properties. Perhaps hand-formed letters, inscribed more deeply in our mind, are building blocks for sturdier mental architectures. However speculative and untested a hypothesis, it resonates with many people's experiences. Often, Haas says, students reported that "somehow with the computer, I can't get a sense of my text. They used that term, over and over. Maybe they were not understanding the structure of their text." The benefits of pen and paper may then be traced, at least in part, to what they offer as interfaces: the ability to easily make squiggles and arrows, to write between lines, to integrate text with diagram. For all the effort expended on programs for brainstorming and mind-mapping and outlining, those functions remain clumsy on computers.

One's writing experiences and preferences are ultimately personal, varying by situation and mental habits. Such is the case with people I interviewed for this article: Marieke Longcamp types for work but takes notes by hand. Christina Haas types documents that can be composed quickly but switches to handwriting for deep thinking. Thierry Olive types his articles but writes in his journal. Both David Armstrong and anthropologist Sherman Wilcox, his collaborator, type almost exclusively, although Wilcox edits by hand. So does John Hayes, a founder of modern cognitive studies of writing.

As for myself, coming to the end of an article that, by the time you read it, will have been written and edited by hand, typed in editor-friendly digital format, then edited again, it is difficult to say what precisely would differ if I had typed from the beginning or composed every last iteration by hand.

Frequently I outline longer articles by hand, so the essential structure would likely be similar. I do think, though, that there is something special in how a pen rests in the hand and moves across paper, to Mangen's sense of meditative flow arising from motor and sensory unity. I don't have that sense, as I do on-screen, of manipulating text blocks but rather words and sentences.

The text itself also feels somehow more complete, especially those parts derived from handwritten notes and hand-annotated reference material. I feel that I know the text more than usual. Years from now I will likely remember this story more fully than those I have typed, which sometimes I encounter online with no memory at all of writing.

Is that sentiment scientific? Not in the least. Would you have the same experience? Not necessarily. Could it be ascribed in part to the extra days that handwriting required or the subject's closeness to my heart? Quite possibly. But I can report, in this nonconclusive, N of 1 study, with no controls or standardized metrics or objective behavioral outcomes, that writing by hand felt good, even right.

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I am writing this article in bold, retroexperimental fashion, using a technique found rarely in the modern publishing world: handwriting, using pen and paper, those dead-tree tools seen by technophiles as historical curiosities, like clay tablets or Remington typewriters. Why do such a thing in a keystroke age?

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5 Brain-Based Reasons to Teach Handwriting in School

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5 Brain-Based Reasons to Teach Handwriting in School

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How Handwriting Supports the Science of Reading

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How Handwriting Supports the Science of Reading

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Narrator:
Welcome to EDVIEW360.

Pam Austin:
I'm going to get right to it. I want to begin by asking you directly, yes or no, is handwriting an important skill to learn?

Laura Stewart:
Absolutely. No question. I think this is something that over the course of my career, there have been waves where handwriting has been de-emphasized, but I think it's really clear that this is a critical part of literacy. It's a major player in literacy.

Narrator:
You just heard Laura Stewart, national director of The Reading League. Ms. Stewart is our guest today on EDVIEW360.

PA:
This is Pam Austin. Welcome back to the EDVIEW360 podcast series. We're so excited to have you back with us. I'm conducting today's podcast from my native New Orleans, LA. Today, we are excited to welcome Laura Stewart, educator and national director of The Reading League. Ms. Stewart is our guest today for EDVIEW360. Welcome, Ms. Stewart.

LS:
Well, thank you. Hi, Pam. I'm really delighted to be with you today.

PA:
Oh, we are so excited to have you. As I said before, I love the topic we're going to dive into, but before we do that, Ms. Stewart, you have had an impact on teachers, administrators, and college students throughout your career. Before we dive into our topic today, please share your journey to your current role as an educator.

LS:
Oh, well, sure. Yeah, I've been in education for a really long time, a really long time, and it's been, I would say, a rewarding and challenging career. I started out as a classroom teacher. I've worked at the building level and district level as an administrator. I've taught at the college level, and I've worked in lots of different professional development initiatives around the country, including one in Jefferson Parish in your backyard there. Also worked in the state of Wisconsin during the Reading First years.

I've also worked in organizations. I was the VP of professional development for the Rowland Reading Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization. I was also the chief academic officer for professional development at Highlights. Highlights for Children, some of you might know the Highlights magazine. So, I've had a lot of varied and different experiences.

I have written a book. I have presented nationally, internationally, but I would say that the through line of my work has really been my passion for and my commitment to early literacy. That's what gets me up in the morning. I think we're at a really hopeful time in terms of knowing what to do to ensure literacy for all. So, I'm really excited about where I am in my career right now and the hope that we have for today's children.

PA:
Oh, my goodness. Such an eclectic background.

PA:
You can say you've done all things in the education world, just listening to the various roles that you have participated in. You honed in on early literacy, and just by you sharing that, it just makes me reflect on our topic for today. I'm going to get right to it. I want to begin by asking you directly, yes or no, is handwriting an important skill to learn?

LS:
Absolutely. No question. I think this is something that over the course of my career, there have been waves where handwriting has been de-emphasized, but I think it's really clear that this is a critical part of literacy. It's a major player in literacy.

PA:
Yes. Over the years, as you mentioned, it has taken a backseat. Why do you think that handwriting has taken a backseat in the educational world?

LS:
Yeah, I think that's a great question. I reflect back on, again, I've been around for a long time and there have been waves in my career where handwriting's been minimized. I think the first time I saw this was during the ascendancy of the whole language years when whole language was the methodology of the day. The emphasis then, I believe, was getting kids to write for expression and meaning. So, the thinking was, and I remember this clearly, the thinking was that if we emphasized handwriting, somehow that's going to get in the way of this expression.

Also I think there was the idea back then that we had to choose. We don't have time for both. So, handwriting could be relegated to a center or maybe a take-home sheet, but it really didn't get the instructional attention that it needed. So, I think that's one wave.

I think a second wave was when we really started emphasizing teaching keyboarding. Again, the thinking was...I'm not saying this was correct thinking, but the thinking was that anytime that we had devoted to handwriting now had to shift to keyboarding. So, I think in both those cases, it was really thinking about how are we prioritizing time? We can't fit everything in. Something has to go. So, handwriting was de-emphasized.

But I do think it's on the upswing for a few reasons. One is I think we're really paying attention to the value of legible handwriting. As I was preparing for this podcast, I did a little research, and I found some fun facts that I think your listeners might be interested in. Thirty-eight million illegibly addressed letters cost the U.S. postal service $4 million a year.

LS:
I know. Here's another statistic. So, nearly 20% of hospital medicine orders are returned by pharmacies as illegible.

LS:
Yeah. So, that's a lot of time and a lot of manpower that we really can't squander. So, that's one reason I think it's on the upswing, but also we know, and Steven Graham is a key player in this, and he stated that there's an...I'm paraphrasing him here...that there's an effect that's a little insidious, because people judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting. So, legibility really matters. By legibility, I mean handwriting that can be easily read by many people. It's a lifelong standard for handwriting.

LS:
Yeah. I mentioned Steven Graham. There's a lot of other leading voices in the area. Virginia Berninger, Beverly Wolf, Karin Harman James, Marilyn Wolf has written...Or, Marilyn Adams has written about this. Louise Spear-Swerling has written about this. Nancy Mather.

I think really the other big realization that has caused us to pay more attention to handwriting is that we recognize that it's critical to automatize handwriting as a transcription skill. So, it frees up working memory to devote that cognitive energy to composition. It's like when we think about making decoding automatic and building that storehouse of instantaneously recognized words so that our brain energy can be devoted to comprehension. There's a parallel, right?

If this transcription skill can become automatized, we devote more cognitive energy to composition. Louise Spear-Swerling even draws a parallel to math. She says if we have a lack of automatic recall, that reduces our mental resources available for advanced computational algorithms in math. So, these researchers, these leading voices, have found that automatized handwriting improves the quality and the quantity of written expression. So, back when we minimized it and we thought the expectation of legible handwriting would impede written expression, we've had it all wrong. We were completely off the mark.

PA:
Right. We thought that we have to choose one over the other. Right?

PA:
The very specific examples you gave that were very practical in regards to the post office for one, right, and the impact of being able to write legibly, right. It's part of those literacy skills, and when you think about that end goal of automaticity, that says a lot right there, Laura. I think teachers can make that connection when we are focusing on...With phonics, we have to understand and be able to retrieve that sound symbol automatically, so we can transfer that example to handwriting as well.

LS:
Yes, exactly. This is great.

PA:
You already answered my next question on how it's making a comeback and why it's making a comeback, which is great. You even alluded to some of the connection between handwriting and reading and writing when you spoke to it improves the quantity and the quality of writing. Can you speak more to that? How does handwriting reinforce reading effectively?

LS:
Yeah. I find this incredibly exciting. I think you do too, Pam, so I think we're on the same page with this.

LS:
OK. So, legibility counts for the reasons that I shared before. Automatized handwriting frees up that cognitive space, but there have been more advances in our understanding the importance of handwriting as it connects to reading and writing. So, I want to think about...Let's think about writing and dig into that a little bit deeper. So, when we write, we're dealing with lots of simultaneous demands. What do we want to say? How do I organize my writing? What do I need to do with each sentence? How do I spell that word? So, we're really taxing our working memory. So, to really devote that optimization to composition, handwriting, spelling, mechanics need to be fluid and internalized, right?

There was actually a study done in 2016 that looked at second-graders who had handwriting instruction and they showed advancement in language skills, alphabet writing, spelling, and composing. So, writing, there's a lot of evidence for, again, its importance in writing.

Now, thinking about this in the context of reading gets really exciting. So, alphabet knowledge, language skills, those are important to reading. I think we all would recognize that.

LS:
Marilyn Adams, back in 1990, said that we need to know the shapes of individual letters in order to read, and that writing, handwriting, aids that recognition. Karin James and her colleagues noted that the motor act of producing a word by hand results in these tactical sensations in the brain that link letters into a simple written word unit. So, I think that, really, I would argue that handwriting's a critical piece of foundational reading.

It gets even better. So, there's research around the areas of the brain that activate during handwriting. Guess what? It's primarily in that all important left hemisphere. So, that manipulation of thumb and fingers as we hand write activates the left brain, which we know manages planning, monitoring, organizing, revising, language processing, and all these skills are critical to not just in writing but self-management and metacognition. So, I think the value of the letter formation handwriting just continues to present itself.

PA:
So, handwriting is definitely valuable?

PA:
To reiterate, we can say that fluency and automaticity in handwriting is a foundational skill.

PA:
All aspects of literacy, we can say, goes back to handwriting. Would you agree with that, Laura?

LS:
Yeah. Like I said, it's a major player. No doubt. No doubt.

PA:
Awesome. I do have another question for you. Just leading into the science of reading, how does handwriting support the science of reading? Now, you gave us some examples already. Can you expound on that?

LS:
Yeah. So, let's go back to the science of reading. We at The Reading League are working with some other like-minded organizations to produce what we're calling the science of reading, a defining guide. Any of you listening in today can find that at whatisthescienceofreading.org. That's our webpage devoted to that. We want to arrive at a simple definition for the science of reading, so I'll read to you this definition: "The science of reading is a vast, interdisciplinary body of scientifically based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing."

So, if that's our baseline definition, all of what I just shared with you fits well within that body of scientifically based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing. Handwriting really spans both, right? Reading and writing.

PA:
So, the reading and writing connection is detailed here. What was that resource again, Laura?

LS:
Yeah. So, actually it's whatisthescienceofreading.org, and it's the Science of Reading, A Defining Movement. Within that webpage, you can find our defining guide. This is really designed to...Again, we're working with other mission-driven organizations in the science of reading community to bring to bear a common definition that we can all rally behind, some rationale for that decision, what the science of reading is, what the science of reading is not. We have a lovely equity statement. We have a preamble that just sets the stage for the science of reading. So, I encourage everybody to check that out.

PA:
Yeah. I encourage you to as well. I know I will dive into this guide myself. Now, we've been talking about handwriting, but people normally think, "Well, there's print and then there's cursive." Tell us more about the two great debates, print and cursive.

LS:
Yeah. Yeah. OK. So, printing or cursive is interesting. So, Steven Graham, as I mentioned before, he found in 2009 that the research is inconclusive regarding teaching manuscript versus teaching cursive in mainstream students who do not struggle. However, we also know from the research that A, students shouldn't be taught both simultaneously, and B, it takes at least two years of instruction to automatize a handwriting process. So, we do have to choose.

What seems to be prevalent practice is manuscript K-2, cursive 2-3. So, one argument in favor of this seems to be that, most, if not all text that our K-2 students encounter or are exposed to is manuscript. So, as we're teaching letters for both reading and writing, this makes sense.

However, I also want to add I listened to a presentation by the wonderful William van Cleave, and he talked about cursive for students with language-based learning difficulties because it cuts down on reversals. All cursive lowercase letters begin at the same place. It reinforces spelling because of continuous movement, and it reinforces the idea of words and spaces, because all the letters of the word are clustered together. So, there's not one definitive answer for that, but again, I think there is prevalent practice that is supportable.

PA:
Definitely. That makes sense. Then when we're dealing with students with those language-based difficulties, then we would likely shift more to the cursive. So, there's not one size fits all, but in the general population, we've got a standard, and then we can adjust what those students who need more.

PA:
OK. I think that's called scaffolding to the student needs. Most definitely.

PA:
Well, let's talk about handwriting or keyboarding.

LS:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, we have a lot of information on this now. We didn't for a while, but we have enough information now to know that keyboarding just doesn't have the same benefits as handwriting. Now, I don't want to minimize it because it does have benefits, surely, but to think that we can replace handwriting with keyboarding, I believe, is misguided. There have been studies about better understanding and retention of concepts, and that students are trying, when they're using their laptop and their keyboards, they're trying to transcript every word because of the speed at which they can type notes.

But with longhand, you have to be cognitively active in picking out key ideas and summarizing and drawing conclusions and putting things into your own words. These are higher-order skills that require a level of cognition that benefits your retention of the concepts. So, there have been studies on this. Three in particular have concluded that college students who took notes by hand performed better on assessments than their peers who typed their notes. That just makes sense, right? When you're longhand, you have to really be thinking about, what do you want to capture?

Then, there was another study. Berninger and colleagues in 2009 did a study where they found that students expressed more ideas and used more complete sentences when they wrote longhand as compared to keyboarding. There was another study in 2016 that found that printing taps into letter processing networks better than typing. There was also, I just read again in preparing for this, I read this article, Where Does Handwriting Fit In? by Susan Cahill. She's an occupational therapist. She stated that even in an era of technology, this kinesthetic process of writing letters is favorable to the act of composition.

So, to unpack that a little bit more. So, when you type, you're hitting a key, and that process, hitting a key, is the same for all letters. When you hand write, each letter has its own unique shape, its own unique formation, so we're kinesthetically imprinting that distinctive shape with each letter. So, bottom line, this study with James, Jao, & Berninger suggests, and I'm going to quote here: "The goal of writing instruction in the information age should be developing hybrid writers who are adept with multiple writing tools, including pens and keyboards."

PA:
I just love it. So, we don't have to choose one or the other? Right?

PA:
We can choose the best of both worlds. There's a phrase you use, cognitively active. I just love that. It's all about engagement and retention, right? So, when you are writing by hand, you are practicing. You're applying those higher-order skills.

PA:
I love it. Engagement and retention. That's what the benefit is there. Thank you. I just love the information that you're sharing. What are some recommendations for handwriting instruction?

LS:
Yeah, so I think it might be cool to look at how children develop in terms of grasping writing implements to think about where do we start, when do we start, how do we start? So, at about 1 to 11/2 years old, kids tend to have this, what is called a fisted grasp, where they just wrap all their fingers around the writing tool. They use their whole arm to make marks. At this age, kids just switch from hand to hand, so they're just experimenting. At about 2 to 3, they do this interesting grasp that I think a lot of OTs refer to as digital-pronate grasp, but this is where the child holds the writing implement in a diagonal position across the palm of the hand, and the fingers in the palm are facing down.

I have to laugh because I was with my granddaughters last week. I have a 2-, almost 3-year-old granddaughter, and that's exactly what she was doing. She's holding this pen in this diagonal position. Again, at this age, kids might switch from hand to hand. There's no hand domination. At 3 to 4, we tend to see a five-finger grasp, again, but this is not a fist. It's where all five fingers are on the pencil or pen or crayon, and they're starting to use wrist movements as opposed to the whole arm. Sometimes this is hard for kids because they're grasping it so tightly that their hands get very fatigued. But at this age, we tend to see more hand dominance.

Then we see this tripod, the typical tripod grasp, at around age 5. That's where kids hold the writing tool between their thumb and their pointer and their middle fingers, and they can keep that ring finger and that little finger curled under. This is about 5, hand dominance starts to really emerge.

I did want to mention the OT community also supports an alternative grip where the writing tool is lodged between the pointer and the middle finger. So, pencil grip is kind of an interesting thing...Just to think about a child's development is an interesting thing because it helps us to ponder instruction, because reinforcing that pencil grip is important. If kids have a cumbersome, awkward pencil grip, it can cause fatigue and discomfort, so we do really want to help our kids get this right. Even though a poor pencil grip can be changed, the older the child is, the harder it is to change. So, that early modeling, early reinforcement is really important.

PA:
So, the understanding that the developmental progress and pencil grip will help us understand that need for providing instruction on something as simple as a how to hold a pencil.

LS:
Yeah, for sure. Also, if we think about that, those developmental milestones, there's readiness skills that we can help our kids develop for this. So, let's think about our preschoolers. Fine-motor manipulation, like using fingers to pick up objects and manipulate objects, and learning basic strokes like vertical lines and horizontal lines and circles and slants. Those are things that we can do with our youngest learners in order to help them be prepared for more formal handwriting instruction.

Then when it comes to that, when actually teaching letter formation, there are key principles to keep in mind. So, we want to have kids get themselves and their paper in position. Position's really important. Sit up tall, keep your feet on the floor, keep both arms on your desk. You want your papers slanted slightly in the same direction as your dominant hand. For cursive, you want even more of a slant. We might want to do warm-up routines for our kids. For example, things like when they're learning manuscript, help them "get ready to print" by making tall and short vertical lines, making zigzags, making circles, making mountains, which is just like pointy, pointy, making waves, making dashes. So, helping kids warm up.

Proper pencil grip, proper paper position, proper seated position, and then warming up. For cursive, we can warm up using what are called windshield wiper movements. Again, mountain movements, wave movements, circles. Just warming up our arms and hands and getting ready for instruction. So, those are some instructional principles to think about.

I also think it's important when we...I mentioned paper, and I wanted to mention this too. We want to give our youngest writers wider-ruled paper when they're just starting out and then narrow the lines, the rules, the lines as they get older. So, those are some things I think that are important to remember. Then I think it's important to remember that handwriting is taught explicitly. We want to teach each letter. We want to model. We want to use clear, verbal cues. We want to make sure kids start at the right place on the line.

So, when I say clear, verbal cues, what I mean is let's say I'm teaching.

Start at the 2:00 position on the midline, circle to the baseline, come up slightly off the baseline. Now that would be lowercase C. So, just having the language around handwriting and being consistent in that language is really important. That's important for both manuscript and cursive.

There's another element to cursive that has to be taught very explicitly, and that's joining. Joining from letter to letter. So, again, teaching kids the right position, having the right kind of paper with the appropriate lines, I think having models to trace, starter dots and arrows to help them remember where to start and how to move, I think those things are very important as well.

PA:
Very good. You gave us a lot of good information, and so I'll just summarize exactly what you shared with us.

PA:
Pencil grip, highly important. Position of the paper, warm-up routines that are specific to print or to cursive. Then that direct, explicit instruction. You mentioned there are various ways to offer that direct, explicit instruction. You talked about naming the lines and some programs. We have a program, Read Well®, where we have the hat, the belt, and the boot line.

PA:
So, what are some common questions you get around handwriting instruction? You gave us a lot of information. What are the most common questions that you hear from people?

LS:
Yeah. So, one question I often get is, so what do we help kids look for in their own handwriting or what are we actually teaching kids that make handwriting legible? I want to refer to these what are called keys of legibility, which I learned from my friends at Zaner-Bloser, and this is their proprietary content, so I did get permission to share. So, their keys to legibility are shape, size, spacing, and slant. That's easy to remember because they begin with a letter S. Shape, size, spacing, and slant.

Shape is the most fundamental because it's the actual appearance of the strokes. Size is the height of the letter. Spacing is the consistency between letters, consistency between words, spacing between sentences. Slant is the angle of writing on the paper. So, this is what we're teaching. We're teaching these attributes of instruction.

Then we want kids to self-evaluate on these keys as they examine their own writing, because one of the aspects of instruction is the modeling and the practice, but the self-evaluation to determine if this is indeed legible. So, let me give you an example. We can have kids look at the height of their letters and ask themselves are all your tall letters the same height? Are all your short letters half the size of tall letters? Do all the descending letters go below the baseline? Are there tails the same length? That type of thing. So, helping kids become discerning and self-evaluative is a really important part of instruction.

Another question I get is how do we help kids with spacing, because spacing is difficult for young children. So, giving them props like paper clips or Popsicle sticks or just having them use their fingers, one paper clip between words, two paper clips between sentences. I know that when I was teaching, I took Popsicle sticks and I drew a little face and a little antenna on the Popsicle sticks, and we called them Spacemen. Right?

LS:
So, giving kids those kinds of props. For slant, to help kids with slant, have them draw lines between their letters in the direction of those letters, and then check to see that the slant is consistent. That works for both manuscript and cursive. So, those are some tips and pointers, I guess, that help kids really gauge their own legibility. That's one question.

Another question I often get is which letters do I introduce when? Now, there is no hard research on this, but we can think about what makes sense, which is what we do a lot in making instructional choices. So, it makes sense to introduce manuscript letters according to their beginning stroke, or what we call their motor stroke family. So, in manuscript, we might group B, H, K, L, T because they all begin with that top-to-bottom vertical stroke.

Now D you think is a tall letter, but it would be grouped with C, O, and G because although it's tall, it's beginning stroke is identical to the strokes in lowercase C, lowercase O, lowercase G, and lowercase A. So, think about stroke families like in cursive, A, C, D, G, Q would be grouped together in the same stroke family. So, that's another question I get.

Another question is, do we introduce lowercase and uppercase simultaneously? Again, no hard research on this, but I believe yes, because handwriting should be taught alongside all the other aspects of each letter. We want kids to know letter names, letter shapes, the sound the letter represents, and its formation. So, I think teaching all those attributes makes a lot of sense.

I often get a question about reversals. When kids are first learning, reversals are fairly common, especially letters like B and D and F and Q. J is very common. Reversals are typically developmental and will improve. In the early stages, it's fairly normal. It isn't necessarily an indicator of dyslexia or another learning disability. I just wanted to throw that out there. So, those are the main questions I often get.

PA:
Wonderful questions, and you can tell they came directly from educators.

PA:
If these are the most common questions you have out there, then you've actually answered my next question. That was about what are some strategies that educators can use to help teach handwriting on a daily basis in the classroom? You've listed a great many of them. Are there any other resources that you'd like to share as well?

LS:
Yeah. So, in terms of strategies, yes, teaching kids what makes a letter legible, self-evaluation, doing explicit modeling. But I also think it's important to remember that this doesn't have to take a lot of time in our school day. One of those waves that we talked about of handwriting avoidance was that we thought there just wasn't enough time for handwriting in the school day. Well, again, I think we had it all wrong because we really can accomplish handwriting instruction and practice in no more than 15 minutes a day. If we think about explicit instruction, I do, we do, you do, we could have five minutes of explicit instruction, five minutes of guided practice with monitoring and coaching, and then five minutes of independent practice and self-evaluation. That can be done as seat work during independent work time, which is totally doable.

But I think more importantly, it's this great bang for our instructional block. Right? Think of all those benefits of handwriting that we mentioned earlier. It couldn't be more important and it's so worth the time. There's a huge return on investment for that. Right?

LS:
So, I think that's another thing just to reassure people. I also would encourage people to look at systematic programs and avoid just downloading stuff off the internet. I think a systematic approach based on the research is really good. I just don't think teachers should have to figure this out for themselves. So, we want to put good resources in teachers' hands to make teachers' lives more manageable.

PA:
Just 15 minutes a day to build that strong foundation to improve writing.

PA:
As you said before, not only the quantity, but the quality of writing as well.

PA:
All right. So, we are nearing the end of our podcast. Are there any final tips you have for educators of handwriting reading and writing?

LS:
Yeah. I don't know if this is a tip, but I want to offer some reassurance. So, Steven Graham, as I mentioned before, and his colleagues did a survey. They found that 90% of first- through third-grade teachers surveyed teach handwriting and most agreed it was important, but only 12% believed they received adequate preparation to teach handwriting in their college preparation courses. Another leading voice in the field, Jane Case-Smith, she found the same, that teachers don't necessarily feel adequately prepared to teach handwriting.

I heard the same from many teachers around reading. I didn't know about the science of reading or evidence line instruction myself, and I felt a tremendous sense of guilt about not knowing and not doing so. I don't know if this is a tip, but my advice is to give yourself grace. You didn't know what you didn't know. We learn, we move on from there. No blame, no shame.

PA:
I love it. Yes. Give yourself grace. Well, we know now we can go forward and make better.

PA:
So, finally, if you could wave a magic wand and change anything in the world of education, what would you change and why?

LS:
Well, oh my goodness. So, I believe all students deserve to learn to read, so I would create a world in which that is the norm. I would create a world where all teachers are fully prepared and fully supported to make that happen.

PA:
I love that. I'd have to join you in that wish as well.

PA:
Thank you for joining us today at EDVIEW360, Ms. Stewart. It's been a pleasure visiting with you. Tell us how we can learn more about you or The Reading League and follow you on social media.

LS:
Oh, thank you so much. Well, it's been my pleasure, Pam. Yeah. So, The Reading League, if your listeners aren't familiar, we're a nonprofit. Our mission is to advance the awareness, understanding, and use of evidence-aligned reading instruction schools. We really want to increase the knowledge of these science-based approaches and demystify how people learn. We want to benefit the lives of millions of our students.

So, please check us out at www.thereadingleague.org and find out more about what we do and who we are and what we offer, because we have many ways to support educators in their work. We have a journal, which is really one of a kind. It's a research-to-practice journal. We offer live events. We offer amazing professional development, lots of free and accessible resources on our knowledge-based webpage, on our YouTube channel.

I have to give a shout out for my podcast. It's called Teaching, Reading and Learning. I have had the honor of speaking to so many of my heroes, in Louisa Moats, David Kilpatrick, Anita Archer, Parker Palmer, Linnea Ehri, Maryanne Wolf, so many along with practitioners in the field, too. So, please tune in.

We also offer, this is really exciting, a TV show for children. It's called The Reading League's Reading Buddies, and it's pure delight. You can subscribe on YouTube and it's broadcast also on WCNY, which is in central New York. So, check that out. Again, The Reading League's Reading Buddies. I also mentioned whatisthescienceofreading.org to find out more about our defining movement. So, those are all the ways that we're really supporting teachers in their work.

So, join us, become a member. Also check to see if your state has a Reading League chapter, and you can join your state's mission as well. You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and you can reach me at laura@thereadingleague.org. Also follow me on Twitter at StewartLauraD.

PA:
Oh, thank you so much. There's so many avenues to make a connection with The Reading League and a connection with you, Ms. Stewart. Thank you so much.

LS:
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

PA:
This is Pam Austin bringing the best thought leaders in education directly to you.

Narrator:
This has been an EDVIEW360 podcast. For additional thought-provoking discussions, sign up for our blog, webinar, and podcast series at voyagersopris.com/podcast. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts and to help other people like you find our show. Thank you.

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How Handwriting Supports the Science of Reading

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Narrator: Welcome to EDVIEW360. Pam Austin: I'm going to get right to it. I want to begin by asking you directly, yes or no, is handwriting an important skill to learn? Laura Stewart: Absolutely. No question.

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Podcast- Why Handwriting Instruction is Important to Literacy

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Podcast- Why Handwriting Instruction is Important to Literacy

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What's inside: In this episode, we spoke with Dr. Kit Mohr, Professor of Language and Literacy at the school of Teacher Education and Leadership at Utah State University about how and why in-service teachers and interventionists should include handwriting instruction in their curriculum.

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Why Handwriting Instruction is Important to Literacy - Glean Education

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What's inside: In this episode, we spoke with Dr. Kit Mohr, Professor of Language and Literacy at the school of Teacher Education and Leadership at Utah State University about how and why in-service teachers and interventionists should include handwriting instruction in their curriculum.

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Want even more information on handwriting? Check out this Padlet

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Want even more information on handwriting? Check out this Padlet

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Learn how handwriting boosts literacy, memory, and learning—and why it remains vital in a tech-driven world.

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Guide students as they explore why words are spelled the way they are with our research-based spelling program: Spellography™.

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Diagrapmming sentences a playful way to analyze everyday language

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Amy Lynn Hess (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Diagramming Sentences: A Playful Way to Analyze Everyday Language

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Additional Excercises for diagramming senctences

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Learn how to write and punctuate complex and compound sentences by using parts of speech as your tools of the trade. But if you make a mistake you will get thrown into the slammer. A simple tutorial and game make complex grammar easy for students in 6th through 12th grade.

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Diagramming Step by Step: One Hundred and Fifty-Five Steps to Excellence in Sentence Diagramming

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Diagramming Step by Step: One Hundred and Fifty-Five Steps to Excellence in Sentence Diagramming [Eugene Moutoux] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Diagramming Step by Step: One Hundred and Fifty-Five Steps to Excellence in Sentence Diagramming

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Warriner's English Grammar and Composition

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Warriner's English Grammar and Composition

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English Grammar & Composition: Complete Course

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English Grammar & Composition: Complete Course [John E. Warriner] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. English Grammar & Composition: Complete Course

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Errors in English and Ways to Correct them

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Errors in English and Ways to Correct them

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Errors in English and Ways to Correct Them: Fourth Edition

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Amazon.com: Errors in English and Ways to Correct Them: Fourth Edition: 9780064610445: Shaw, Harry: Books

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TypeTastic - Take Your Students into Typing Adventure!

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Discover 700+ typing activities for all grade levels – and unleash the joy of typing in your school

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Typing Club 1-5th (has lots of ads- some inappropriate- use with an ad blocker extension. 

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Typing Club 1-5th (has lots of ads- some inappropriate- use with an ad blocker extension. 

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Learn touch typing online using TypingClub's free typing courses. It includes 650 typing games, typing tests and videos.

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Learn to Type | Type Better | Type Faster - Typing.com

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World's most popular free typing program! Typing.com's K-12 typing curriculum features touch typing, digital citizenship, coding lessons, and games.

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TypingTest.com- typing fluency (measures accuracy and speed (WPM). 

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TypingTest.com- typing fluency (measures accuracy and speed (WPM). 

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TypingTest.com - Test Your Typing Speed in 60 seconds

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Welcome to the #1 Typing Speed Test! Check your true typing speed, accuracy and skill level in just 60 seconds.

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Seriously, Syntax Matters- best webinar slides

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Seriously, Syntax Matters- best webinar slides

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Webinar: Professional Learning Series - Syntax

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Literacy How Syntax Play List- 14 videos

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Literacy How Syntax Play List- 14 videos

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Syntax--sentence-level skills--refers to the way words are put together to form phrases, clauses, or sentences.

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This is a routine our second-grade teachers use for Phonological Awareness, Orthography (spelling), Meaning and Context, and Application (sentence writing).

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UFLI Grades 3-6 30 min a day Morphology Instruction Lessons

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UFLI Grades 3-6 30 min a day Morphology Instruction Lessons

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Modeled Writing Lesson from Presentation

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Modeled Writing Lesson from Presentation