• Background in Elementary Ed, Special Ed, Bilingual Ed, and TESOL

• Migrant Educational Outreach Teacher

• Bilingual Educator (Spanish/English)

• Bilingual ICOT (Integrated Co-taught SPED)

• Literacy Coordinator

• Head of Student Support Services

• English as a New Language (ENL)

New York/China

Cheese-maker

Traveler

Pun-lover

• allows students to relearn more legible writing and rewire the motor pathways more efficiently

• supports students with dyslexia and dysgraphia because of the flow of writing

• may support more of a "flow" due to how the letters are formed and connected

In fact, printing itself is a pretty recent invention in the early 20th century and the person who initially invented it and pushed for its use in schools, Sir Edward Johnson, actually regretted it because instead of helping students’ reading skills to improve like he thought (showed no effect), their handwriting skills actually decreased dramatically. This doesn't mean we shouldn't start with printing but there is a lot of a debate, discussion and study around this and I find it all fascinating and helpful even if it's not definitive.

All this to say, it takes about 2 years to master any new handwriting system (printing, cursive, keyboarding) so the time to start is now! It's also VERY helpful to embed this instruction and practice within phonics and encoding practice (or perhaps morphology work?) so that it's not a separate time of day.

Also, the go-to thought might be to push keyboarding for students with illegible writing BUT there's also a lot of research (here's another good one to check out) that says that writing and, in particular, handwriting supports more of the reciprocal positive relationship between reading and writing than keyboarding.

Part 2: Composition

Part 3: Consolidating Our Learning