Is it still important to improve your kid’s handwriting practice in 2021? Research shows a clear correlation between handwriting and literacy and memory.
Keep reading to find out how you can get handwriting help for your child in today’s classroom.
Prefer to watch this content? Click the play button on my video below!
Handwriting in 2021
What is happening in the classroom in 2021? Most of the kids are back in school. Some are still fully virtual, meaning they are still doing all their classwork and homework digitally with no paper in the classroom at all. Then we’ve got some kids that are just like before with paper and pencil. And then there are the kids that are stuck somewhere in the middle, half and half.
I go in to a lot of schools. I talk to a lot of teachers. I see what’s going on. Here’s some of what I’ve been hearing teachers saying –
- “I haven’t seen a child write on paper for over a year and a half.”
- “Whenever my kids have to write on paper, it’s literally the worst I’ve ever seen it.”
- “They can’t organize their thoughts on the paper.”
- “The handwriting is illegible.”
- “It takes the kids forever to write.”
- “The kids are constantly trying to erase and do over.”
Even teachers who are in a classroom that have regular paper and pencil are definitely also seeing a decrease in their students’ handwriting.
The thing is nobody is expecting super neat handwriting that’s perfect. What we’re looking for is simply legible handwriting that’s fluent.
My marker for fluent, legible handwriting is that the kids don’t have to think about it and that the teachers don’t have to think about it.
In this blogpost, I’m going to talk about how we can improve your kid’s handwriting in 2021 in a classroom that’s maybe fully digital and where the kids haven’t had to use paper and pencil for a year and a half.
What Does Handwriting Research Say?
The research on handwriting shows that there’s a direct correlation between handwriting and literacy. There’s a direct correlation between handwriting and memory. We know that writing affects kids; it helps them to write by hand. In addition, the research shows that children in today’s technological world should be able to write by hand as well as keyboard.
Check out more research on handwriting in this video.
For those kids that haven’t written for a year and a half, we don’t know what it’s going to look like for them. Research in the past has shown us that they will have difficulties with studying and taking notes.
Handwriting Help for Your Child
If your child is lucky, they’ll have a teacher who’s stopping and going back and embedding handwriting intervention into the classroom and talking about letter size and spacing.
If you’re not so lucky, you just have a bunch of random handwriting worksheets coming home and your kid’s probably making chicken scratch on them.
As parents, it’s important to look for resources that are proven, that emphasize letter size, spacing and self-awareness.
Here are some resources for handwriting help for you:
- Check out my Legible Handwriting for Kids Foundation Workbook. Click here to learn more.
- My FREE seven-part guide of handwriting resources, the Real Life Handwriting Resource Guide.
- My Legible Handwriting for Kids (LHK) Program is opening very soon! This step-by-step course is specifically designed for your writer that has a hard time being fluent and has a hard time keeping up with writing. Get on the waitlist for the LHK Program by signing up here!
Remember, we want to get our kids to that place where they don’t have to think about handwriting.
Hopefully you found this inside scoop into the classroom in 2021 helpful. Go ahead and check out the links above. Any questions about handwriting? Drop them in the comments below!
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