Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Honor Roll School official podcast: home of the school's up-to-date information adding another layer to our school communication --- This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. We make no representations or warranties regarding the accuracy, completeness, or applicability of the content. SEG Inc. expressly disclaims any and all liability or responsibility for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or other damages arising out of any individual’s use of, reference to, reliance on, or inability to use, this podcast or the information presented in this podcast. This podcast and all its content, including but not limited to audio recordings, show notes, artwork, and branding elements, are protected by copyright laws. All rights reserved. No part of this podcast may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted without prior written permission from SEG Inc.
Speaker 1 0:00
Hello, this is mrs. Quintero, the proud head of school of the Honor Roll School, and welcome back to the pod, the Dolphin Podcast. Please follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Search us as the Tank THRS Official Dolphin Podcast. Don't forget to turn on those notifications so you don't miss the next episode. Today, I will be joined by Ms. Humlicek. She will be sharing the impact of handwriting from her recently published article in the magazine Education Week. But first, let's dive right into what's coming up. Our 35th anniversary is what's coming up. Please join us on Friday, September 18th at 9 a.m. as part of our celebration and to honor our tradition and spirit of giving back, help us meet our goal by compiling 350 birthday bags to give to children in need right here in our community by donating birthday bag items. All items are due by September 14th. Help us to give where we live. Additionally, don't forget to work together as a family to create our 35th anniversary yearbook cover to be part of the contest. I can't wait to see all the creative entries. These are also due on Monday, September 14th. Everybody loves a parade. The honor roll school will have a float in the Fort Bend County Fair Parade on Friday, September 25th. With no school on this day, we are encouraging the THRS community to come out and proudly cheer us on. We are holding a lottery for students to be picked in grades three through eight to ride on the float. So, wow, how special is that? Please see the Dolphin Days newsletter for more details on the Birthday Bag Give Where You Live initiative, the yearbook cover contest, and the lottery entry for riding on the parade float. So hey, Ms. Humlicek, welcome back to the pod. Thank you. Hi, Ms. Quintero, so very proud of you for having your article published, and the whole school community is very proud of you. That's quite the honor and special for our school. So let's get right into it because I'm an advocate for handwriting, and I know you love handwriting. So often we are asked, like in this world where children can type and swipe and dictate and ask technology to write for them, why should we still teach them to pick up that pencil?
Speaker 2 2:30
I think it's so important that we listen to what the research says about handwriting, and handwriting develops the fine motor skills that students need, for example, when they're younger, those fine motor skills that get developed through handwriting or are the ability to tie their own shoes or zip their own jackets. But then later in life, when we think about fine motor skill development, that leads to maybe they become a surgeon and they're performing heart surgery. That's really complex, and so it's not just about protecting handwriting instruction in the early elementary school years, but it's also about the impact that explicitly teaching handwriting will have positively on students' lives as they develop and in their adult life too.
Speaker 1 3:22
Yeah, I was interested in one of the things that you pointed out in your article that you say that every handwritten letter requires the brain to solve a new problem. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 3:35
So think about when I go to type the letter S. I am using perhaps my index finger. I'm picking it up and I'm pecking the letter S on a keyboard. Then think about the alternative: either writing the letter S in print or writing the letter S in cursive, and that asks the brain to shift the pressure that they're putting on their pencil or shift the direction that the stroke of the pencil is making, and that is asking the brain to solve more problems, which is turning on more neural networks. And so, when we think about brain activity, researchers actually did this out of the University of Indiana, where they looked at early literacy brains. They used brain imaging to look at neural pathways that were linked to reading, and when children were hand writing, those neural pathways turned on, forming letters by hand. But when they asked to type those same words that they were just previously asked to form by hand, those neural networks linked to reading did not switch on, and that's powerful research.
Speaker 1 4:51
Yeah, it's interesting because you did mention too, and I think this falls into the same category as the multisensory experience, right? So that's what. I'm hearing from you that they're seeing it, they're hearing it. It's moving, it's saying sound, so it's engaging multiple senses at the same time, and that is important for early literacy. We see that every day. We see it in classrooms every day. We see kids engaging that way every single day. I wanted to delve into for a second, you wrote about we don't stop teaching reading because of audiobooks. We shouldn't stop teaching handwriting because of keyboards. So why do you think that comparison is so important?
Speaker 2 5:36
I think it's a really tangible metaphor because I'm a big reader of audiobooks. I love listening to books on my commute, but that doesn't mean that I don't need to learn to read actual words on a page. And so I think the metaphor rings true because while absolutely typing should come, and my article does not argue that we should eliminate typing, but it does argue that we should teach typing later once the foundational skills are in place for handwriting. And so, same with children. We're still teaching students to read, but later in life they might enjoy audio books like I do as an adult, so that parallels the same later in life. They are definitely going to explicitly learn typing, and we have typing program here at the honor roll school. We do teach that, but before we teach that, it is essential that they learn print and cursive.
Speaker 1 6:37
Yeah, cursive. Oh, let's talk about cursive for a minute because that is a dying art out in the education world. I think we were joking before this all started about how cool it is to write our name in cursive in different ways. And you know, us ladies, when we get married, we change our name and we write, "How am I going to write my new name? And it's part of our identity and who we are. So, Ms. Humlicek, you know, describe handwriting as part of the child's identity. What does a child's individual handwriting communicate that a standardized digital font cannot?
Speaker 2 7:15
Yeah, it's so funny because you were talking about: Do you want to make the Q that looks like the two or the Q
Speaker 1 7:22
that looks like a Q.
Speaker 2 7:23
That looks like a Q. And I was talking about how I would practice the H as a star, and that is all our flair. That is all our personality coming through on paper. And when I see a child write by hand, there's this moment after they write, where you can look at them and see this bright light, where they feel like I did that. That is me on paper. That is my identity, my personality. Nobody in this room would write the same way I would write. There's nobody that has the exact same signature. But if you were to write Quintero or type Humlicek into a computer, we might get to pick the font, but it it loses that personality and that identity, and so cursive instruction is so important, but very much questioned, and children still benefit from learning it, and so it's why we at the Honorable School have protected it. It's never gone away, but now there are laws coming out from state level mandating cursive curriculum because we never had to be told. We just kept doing it because we know that it is important and we know that it is best for children. But what does the research say? What is the why behind we make those instructional decisions? Handwriting is also part of developing fluency, and again, fine motor skills. So it gives another way for students to express themselves. But what we often see with children who write in cursive, is that they are able to write faster. That's what we mean by fluency. But they're also synthesizing and summarizing and processing the information as they handwrite it in cursive, versus if they were to type notes, that elicits a different part of the brain.
Speaker 1 9:21
So you mentioned here at the honor roll school, we have kept and protected handwriting. You know, I know the little ones do early handwriting, but kindergarten really starts really getting into it, and second grade starts that cursive process. So here at the honor roll school, I'm asking you, Ms. Humlicek, what does good handwriting instruction look like?
Speaker 2 9:45
I think that's a great question. I'm going to start by answering what handwriting instruction is not, and it doesn't have to be tedious worksheets. Repetition is important, so we do need that foundational time of practice, but it can. Be tracing on a whiteboard. Kids love expo markers and a whiteboard and erasing. It can be going outside and writing with chalk. It could be practicing letter strokes. This is my favorite and shaving cream. And did you know shaving cream also cleans off desk? We used to do that in my fourth grade classroom. Writing letters in sand that also calls back to the multisensory experience. It feels fun. They don't realize they're really practicing their handwriting, and it is enacting parts of their brain. That multisensory experience helps the learning stick.
Speaker 1 10:38
Okay, all of those things sound amazing. So, how can parents support handwriting development at home without turning it into another academic battle they they might be experiencing when they're helping their kids with homework?
Speaker 2 10:52
I love that you don't want it to be a battle because you don't want children to look back on handwriting instruction with negative feelings. So, it we want to make it as authentic as possible. So practice writing your name, right? That's their identity, the flair of the Y at the end of the name, or how they dot their I. Just love it. But also when you're writing thank you notes to family members, that is a great way to practice handwriting. Challenge them to write it in cursive, labeling pictures for younger learners. As you are having them draw, can they label parts of their picture? Even if you, as a parent, model it for them, and then they replicate what you've modeled, have them write a grocery list. All those are real, authentic ways that teach children the value of their handwriting beyond just this is something I'm doing for school, and that's really what we what we want out of this process is for students to understand the value of the written word in print and in cursive.
Speaker 1 11:58
So at the end of your article, you have this idea that every child deserves to look at their own writing and think, "I did that. Why is that so important for these kids?
Speaker 2 12:12
It's not just about the handwriting. When they look back on what they've written by hand, they're growing in their confidence. They're growing in their identity. They have had to persevere. Learning cue is not easy. The cursive cue not easy, right? So they are learning to persevere and learning to overcome. They are also learning that hard things get easier. When I first learned the cue, that was difficult for me, but look at me now. I'm fluently writing the cursive letter Q, and that is something that are those soft, bigger skills that are so important that students need to learn in school, and it can be learned and will be learned through handwriting.
Speaker 1 12:55
So one last question, Ms. Humlicek, and this is kind of to wrap up this whole handwriting. Should we still have it as instruction in school debate that's going on, but it's something that's traditional here at the honor roll school, and it's something that we never gave up, and we're going to continue to do. But what do we risk losing, not just academically but developmentally, if we decide handwriting is no longer important.
Speaker 2 13:22
We are at risk if we don't teach explicit handwriting instruction. Our students are are going to lose fine motor skill development. They're going to lose muscle memory development. They are going to lose the ability to slow down, and that is something I talk about in the article that handwriting gives children something that is very rare in this era, and it's permission to slow down. But it is value in the slow. There is value in the slowing down, because while speed is often celebrated, like getting the right answer first, with handwriting it takes more time, and so it challenges the brain purposefully to begin making decisions, like we talked about before: summarizing instead of just transcribing, organizing their ideas, and synthesizing and thinking about their ideas as they are writing. And I think that cognitive ability is at risk when we take handwriting instruction away.
Speaker 1 14:24
Everybody out there listening, if you are a parent here at the Honor Roll School, we will be linking Ms. Humlicek's article from Education Week in our Dolphin Days, along with the podcast link. Remember, you can find the Dolphin Podcast in the weekly Dolphin Days newsletter on the THRS app on Spotify and Apple Podcast. Look for the Fighting Dolphin logo. Until next time, this is Ms. Quintero
Speaker 2 14:50
and Ms. Humlicek
Speaker 1 14:51
signing off from the tank.
Speaker 3 14:53
This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. This podcast and all. Its content are protected by copyright laws. All rights reserved. No part of this podcast may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted without prior written permission from SEG Inc.