EXTRA! EXTRA! – the results are in from The Paradigm Company’s first Drawing!

So many of you showed an interest in both of our wonderful prizes that we wish we could give one to each and every one of you!  But reality (and our Chief Financial Officer) must prevail and we had to limit the prizes to just two.  So without further ado, the envelope please . . . . .

For a complete hardbound set of the fabulous McGuffy’s Readers, the winner is:

Mrs. Amy Johnson of Benton, Arkansas

For the set of teaching materials that consists of Alpha-Phonics (including the CD ROM version),  the Alpha-Phonics & How To Tutor Phonics Workbook, a set of the Alpha-Phonics & How To Tutor Little Companion Readers, and the Blumenfeld Oral Reading Test, the winner is:

Jennifer Adams

Congratulations to both of you and may you benefit immensely from your prizes!

For the rest of you: Thank You!  Your enthusiastic response to our first drawing has encouraged  us to plan more opportunities for you to win valuable Paradigm Company teaching materials so don’t stray too far and be sure to check in regularly to our blog for all the latest news!

Is Learning Cursive Handwriting Still Necessary?

When I was in junior high school I became fascinated by all things Russian.  I listened to Radio Moscow, received copies of Izvestia and Pravda in the mail, and even taught myself Cryillic, that style of printing the Russians and a hand full of others (mostly Slavs) use.  Fifty years later, as I walked the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg for the first time, this skill I picked up as a kid actually came in handy, much to my great pleasure. 

I never did learn to speak Russian so in the end I still had to pull out the dictionary and look up words even though I was able to decipher and say many of them.  I really came up against a brick wall the first time I discovered a sample of Russian handwriting.  “Yikes”, I thought to myself.  “I don’t recognize any of this!” even though I knew the entire printed alphabet.

All this is to say that I am extremely glad I was taught how to use cursive in my own language at an early age because I know how foreign it would seem to someone who never learned it.  I’ll bet most of us have never questioned the value of having learned it, even though we may not be too proud or our own hen scratching.  It’s a skill that we apply every day and must be counted at least as basic as the times tables in usefulness .  We write our checks with it, then we sign those checks with it; we write notes to ourselves and others with it; and some of us even write love letters with it, though probably not as often as we should.  Yes, it is true that it does take some time to decipher those old recipes that grandma handed down to us, but how wonderfully personalized they are and what a vivid reminder of that grand old soul!

Given the times we live in, I guess it should come as little surprise that there is a powerful movement gaining momentum to do away with the teaching of handwriting in our schools.  To many folks more modern than I, cursive just seems to be so antiquated, so. . . useless, so . . . .irrelevant, especially when kids are now taught “keyboarding” in their earliest school years. If this effort is successful, it would no doubt mean the skill would probably die out in a generation or two.  Which in turn makes me wonder: will there soon be a generation of Americans who can no longer read the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence in their original forms?

Not long ago I was handed a newspaper article about how “joined-up writing” is no longer going to be required in my own state of Idaho, or at least the decision will be left up to individual school districts.  The state has decided to conform to something called “The Common Core State Standards” which do not include cursive at all.  Along with Idaho, 42 others have so far signed on to this attempt at national homogenization and you can bet there will be pressure to push these efforts even farther.

But are these critics of the old and cherished skill correct in their assumptions that cursive is no longer needed?

There are certainly some highly qualified experts who reply with a definite “No!” and aren’t afraid to stand up in the defense of handwriting.  Indiana University neuroscientist Karin Harman James is one of them.  Last year she testified before an Indiana Senate committee in support of a bill requiring handwriting be taught in public schools.  Ms. James’ research led her to testify that “For children, handwriting is extremely important. Not how well they do it, but that they do it and practice it.”  One thing she learned was that after transcribing a paragraph in cursive, college students remembered the information better a week later than they did in printing or keyboarding.  (1)

There are also studies that show that papers turned in with neat handwriting score better than those that aren’t so neat.  (Wish I’d known that.) (2)

Another researcher, Virginia Berninger, of the University of Washington, has shown that kids wrote more words, wrote them faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand rather than with a keyboard.  She says that the sequential finger movements needed to form letters activate massive regions of the brain that are involved in thinking, language, and working memory (used for temporarily storing and managing information.) (3)

Perhaps the whole misguided effort do erase handwriting will eventually exhaust itself and end up like so many other supposedly just and good causes.  Those of us on the “write” side should take some solace that there is so much push back, as more people learn of the effort to end handwriting as we know it.

Certainly, we at the Paradigm Company would like to think the future of that practical and artistic skill is more secure than what the reformers would wish.  We have learned that children actually find learning to print much easier after they have learned handwriting.  And as counter-intuitive as it may sound, kids who have never learned to print make the best handwiters!  We have also discovered that the movements required to form the ornate and curly letters actually improve the development of a child’s fine motor skills.  If you are worried that your school is no longer teaching handwriting, take a look at How To Tutor Cursive Handwriting and see how easy (and inexpensive) it is to do it yourself!

We would love to hear from you about this – how do you feel about your kids not learning handwriting?