Message to Parents: Your kids only learn to read once!

Your child will only learn to read and write once! Don’t miss it!

Sometimes it happens in the space of a few short months. You can play a vital role, and it may be one of the most significant things you and your child ever do together. Reading and writing are the most important skills children learn for success and happiness in school and beyond.

Learning to read and write is a staggering accomplishment, much more difficult than learning to speak and to understand speech. Becoming literate is one of the most essential major learning experiences of modern life. It is a valuable tool for personal expression, and a doorway to the written wisdom of the brightest and most interesting members of the human tribe since history began.

I believe that computers offer an extraordinary opportunity for parents to participate in this critical learning experience with their children. Educational software and learning materials provid a unique framework for short enjoyable day-to-day lessons. A few minutes each day is all that it takes. (more…)

Hey Mom! I Spell Better When I Type!

We were on port tack in the middle of the Atlantic, moving fairly smoothly toward landfall in the Azores. Our family of four was on the way from New Orleans to West Africa in our 31 foot sloop.  After some rough days, it was a relief to keep my food down and enjoy being at the helm. Melissa, 11, was reading in the hammock, and Matthew, 13, was wedged in the companionway typing his log.  I had been encouraging him to use our little portable typewriter, because he was left-handed and had considerable difficulty writing legibly.  I was sympathetic because I could remember my own elementary school tears, trying to write as a lefthander.  I remember forcing myself to turn the paper to the right and hold my hand under the line so I wouldn’t smudge the ink.

Matthew used the left-handed  “inverted” hand posture when he wrote, cocking his wrist and using the larger muscles of his wrist and arm rather than the fine motor coordination of his fingers.  The letters ran together as if his mind was racing ahead of his fingers.  He missed details, like dotting i’s and crossing t’s.  He didn’t notice his spelling errors and could hardly read what he wrote.

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Losing Cursive?

A recent article in Education Week bemoans the fact that students are using cursive less and less, and in some cases, do not know how to read cursive. They still seem to do pretty well at printing, and reading what someone else has printed.  Interesting! My daughter is a calligrapher and loves forming letters in different “hands”. But those flowing letters may become over the next years more of an art form, rather than an everyday functional way to put words on paper.

It’s true that typing on the computer has become an easier way for all of us to write. Should we go back to cursive?  The educational goal for writing is for children to be able to express their thoughts in text and to edit and refine those thoughts in order to communicate clearly and effectively.  If this process is easier using a word processor—no erasing, no throwing out the paper and starting over—then children will spend more time writing and enjoy it more.  Research has shown that children write longer stories and make more edits and revisions when they use a word processor. Isn’t that what we want to encourage?

However they do not write more easily on the computer if they are “hunting and pecking”.  They need to learn how to type. So why are we waiting until fifth grade or later to teach children to type, when they can learn it in first grade?  It’s actually easier to press keys than to bend their little fingers around a pencil and form letters.  Why not help them do both? They could establish a touch-typing habit early, so writing can become as enjoyable as possible.  What do you think?