The downside to the information age is the decrease in fine motor skills used for writing.
This is a problem I am seeing more often as laptops and tablets replace the use of pad and pen. An increasing number of students are unable to form legible letters of the alphabet or write numbers clearly enough so they may read them thirty seconds later.
Some students going into Year 8 are incapable of writing between the lines of a paper or forming numbers within the squares of a quad ruled page. Students in Year 5 are unable to produce or read their name in cursive script. These students are struggling with the fine motor skills required to help them to learn.
I have recently finished reading an article by Maria Konnikova, “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades?”, which suggests evidence is emerging of a greater link between handwriting and learning. It appears children learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand.
Learning is a complicated process. When we reproduce letters, or anything else, by hand a plan is required before executing the action. The end result is highly variable in that it will not exactly represent the original. Learning to identify variable representations is important to decoding letters when reading.
The research by Virginia Berninger, a psychologist at University of Washington, indicated that when a child who composed text by hand (either printing or cursive) “They not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on the keyboard, but expressed more ideas.”
There is also a suggestion of different neuro-pathways being developed in the brain when a child progresses on from printing to cursive writing.
Research at the University of California has reported laboratory and real-world studies of students learning better when they take notes by hand than when they type on a keyboard.
I ask you “Is it time to throw away the pen and paper and adopt the technology of the keyboard?” Was it time to give up walking when we invented the car?
My suggestion to help build a better student is to continue to use the old fashioned copy book so your student may practise and learn to form letters and numbers. Encourage them to practise twenty minutes a day until they are proficient with writing the printed word. Allow this to develop into the practice of cursive writing so they may be able to record classroom notes in secondary school, lecture notes at university or record the minutes of a business meeting.
No student can function well without fuel for the brain. Going to school without breakfast is starting the tank on near empty. The body’s metabolism is slowed until the first meal to break the fast and it is running on reserve supply until then.
Sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in a day to fit in what needs to be done, and there seems to be not enough weeks in the year for the school curriculum.
One night Snowy the chimp squeezed through the bars of the metal of his cage at the zoo. He felt happy because he escaped. As soon as he got to the forest he was climbing up trees very high so he could eat fruit. He made his house at the top of the trees. Snowy the chimp lived in the forest for the rest of his life.
One sunny Monday, Piper the piglet jumped to read the newspaper which said that the Pigalimpiks were on today.
Cousteau the wildebeest was walking in a grassy meadow full of daisies, when he saw a brush turkey. He was confused and scared and he began to shiver while his heart began to pound. The brush turkey walked towards him and Cousteau froze. Then he ran into a hole and became stuck as footsteps came closer and closer. Cousteau remembered the call that would bring his herd towards him and he opened his mouth and bellowed. When they came to help him they were quite unkind about his courage.
One dark cold winter, a baby polar bear named Amy was born. She had a silvery coat that everyone loved and she had a beautiful flower in her ear. One afternoon the baby polar bear ran away and saw a hunter kill a penguin and she was so scared that she ran back home. The next day she saw the same hunter again and he was going to kill her Mum. The little polar bear Amy bit him so hard that he cried and she saved her mum and they went home.
One morning when all the people had gone to work and school, the fruit people popped out to play. Little Apple and Little Pear, who everyone thought were not smart, looked and saw a glass they knew not to touch, but they did. They dropped it and they cried, “How can we fix this glass?” The Apple and Pear glued it together and the other fruit people said “Sorry, we said you were dumb” and “Thank you for fixing it.” When the people came home they slept all night.
In the middle of the ocean there was a pirate named Red Beard. He was alone. It was a stormy night when lightning struck and it hit the boat which sunk. Red Beard had a red beard and was feeling unsafe. He thought to himself “I should go home.” Because of the storm, his boat sank so he tried to swim. The tide was too rough for the pirate to swim.
On a dark, stormy night, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a pirate ship bobbed up and down. The ship’s captain’s name was Burger Beard. He was a chef and he knew that he made the best burgers in the world. On really long trips he usually ran out of food so he ate the food from his beard. On that stormy night, he had a good feast form his beard.
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