Just because we are cramming the curriculum with more and more details doesn't mean we through out the baby with the bathwater...as districts tend to do when new leadership replaces former...and the new ego "knows better what we need."
Handwriting develops hand-eye coordination, ensures kids will be able to read both print and cursive (it's font folks...and there's a variety of fonts to recognize), and reinforces READING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT.
Daily handwriting practice, not only reinforces letter-work mastery, but reinforces mastery of something in general. It results in the neural connection among expending effort, focus, aiming increasingly for accuracy and satisfaction in seeing the progress one can make when we concentrate and aim high. It reinforces that progress is made OVERTIME...and we experience a sense of time needed at each new level of accuracy. As supervisors of children's development of self-efficacy, we become better observers and provideers of the quantity and wuality of support each child needs in order to operate at his/her independent level.
NOTE: home practice lend itself to the the individual child's INDEPENDENT LEVEL OF PERFORMNCE (Goggle: LEV VYGOTSKY). Home practice should operate on the independent level unless the ClassTeacher has made a special agreement with parent at home who is comfortable/trained to provide appropriate (necessary and sufficient) support.
We know support is appropriate when the child demonstrates beneft from the instruction without evidence of undue frustration. Frustration that brings about anger/tears or forms of withdrawal is never useful, nor helpful to progress...and in fact is debilitative and counter-productive in a vast variety of ways...none of which are good.
NEURO-SPEAKING...handwriting practice smooths out virtual kinks in the brain through repetition of synapses (bathing brain representations of each juncture from one letter to the next with deliciously smooth brain chemicals). Perhaps this is why kids truly enjoy handwriting when given the time and proper supports as needed.
So at Delacorte Spirit Campus...and in our Global Parent Homes...we make space and time to honor our children's important handwriting practice daily.
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