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Let's talk about handwriting and/or keyboarding. If you want to get something out on paper, you have to be able to write it. You also have to be able to spell it. But even if you know how to spell the word, you have to be able to get those letters down on the paper. And if students of any age have to put too much energy into thinking about how to form those letters, it's going to take energy away from the critical thinking parts of being able to write. Now, there's a lot of research out there that shows that students, by the time they're in fourth grade, if they're not fluent with that handwriting and spending too much energy, it really affects the quality of their writing, of their composing.
Now, there's uncertainty ... there's no set answer to the question about should it be cursive, should it be manuscript, but we do know that whichever it is, students have to become fluent in that. Now, let's also make the connection to keyboarding or typing. Very young children don't have ... they're not developmentally able to do the kind of keyboarding that adults and older students can, but they can hunt and peck. Once students hit about fifth or sixth grade, they're developmentally more able to do the keyboarding. And there's great debate over whether we should spend time with handwriting or go right to keyboarding. I'm not here to answer that question. I do believe that for elementary children, in particular, there's also so much research that shows that if students are learning to hand write the letters at the same time that they're learning the letter-sound correspondences, that improves the letter writing, and it also improves the alphabetic knowledge that they're developing during a phonics lesson. So, for lots of reasons, the ability to be fluent in that transcription skill of handwriting and/or keyboarding is absolutely essential.
