We knew this skill was important, but now, a few years down the line of removing handwriting and cursive from school curriculums we now know how important it is as a skill. We now know that the ability to actually write letters and sentences by hand is an important keystone for other skills like literacy, creating important and unique neural pathways, and boosting memory retention for reading and writing far more effectively than typing.
It’s one of those building blocks that you might not like doing as a kid, and that takes dull focus and repetition to learn. The knock-on effects of not developing good handwriting skills at a young age are not conducive to literacy later on. Not learning handwriting, print, and cursive in their forms can quite simply make kids functionally illiterate, or make competent reading and typing much harder for them.
Technology has long distracted us from the “important” parts of life, communicating with and bonding with others through shared time and interests. We’ve become increasingly isolated from our neighbors, friends, and communities.
Spending time with our children, though, is supposed to be one area we should prioritize. If you have children, it is probably THE thing that you’re trying to reduce time spent in other areas to get back to. This involves teaching and learning with them and helping them build important skills and responsibilities that will support them for the rest of their lives.
All too often we push these responsibilities off onto technology, setting our kids up with the wonderful glowing rectangle to watch a video or to play a game, or when they’re older to teach them how to read and to write, skills that take great focus and time to learn and require being bored and being comfortable with that state of mind so that our brains can fully accept and take in the new information that we are trying to force into it and build the new neural pathways that need to be built in order to remember and understand, well, everything.
This idea, this divide between those who see a problem with using technology for such things and those who do not, along with the age-old feeling of rejection and feeling of being judged by our in-laws, brought a brewing conflict to a head between this family. This grandmother got her 4th-grade iPad-kid granddaughter to read an actual book instead of just learning through her iPad, like the girl’s mother, the grandmother’s daughter-in-law, had wanted.
Her granddaughter had long struggled with reading simply because she had never had the proper approach to learning the skill. When she was watching her granddaughter after school, she realized that the reading app that her granddaughter was using was actually reading out the stories to her, leaving the young girl with little to actually do or learn except sit there or listen. She instead gave the girl a book to read and instructed her to read through a page and ask if there were any words that she did not understand or know how to sound out.
Author: Kayitsi.com
