10 Reasons Why Kids Should Learn the Cursive Alphabet
Cursive isn’t taught in many schools[1] today, but it should be. Here are ten reasons why kids should still be learning the cursive alphabet.
- Cursive Is Beautiful and Boosts Creativity
Frankly, cursive is beautiful, a cousin to calligraphy – it’s basically like a form of art.
And like art, learning cursive boosts mental activity in the brain and improves left/right brain coordination.
This promotes a stronger, more active brain – from which creativity springs.
Researchers at the University of Washington found[2] that kids who wrote in cursive, versus on a keyboard, “were writing more words and expressing more ideas.”
- Cursive Is a Faster Way To Write
For many of us, our brains think faster than our fingers can keep up with, but cursive has the edge on printing when it comes to the speed of writing.
This is because we pick up the pencil less frequently when writing in cursive.
If your child has a lot of ideas, encourage them to learn cursive so that they can write down everything they dream up much more quickly than printing.
- Cursive Sets Up Kids for Later Life
Not only does learning the cursive alphabet benefit kids while they’re young, but it may also have an impact on their cognitive ability all their lives.
The College Board found that[3] students who wrote in cursive on the essay section of the SATs scored slightly higher than those who printed.
And William Klemm, Ph.D., author of a Psychology Today article, compares cursive writing to playing a musical instrument in terms of brain activity.
That means that if students learn cursive while they’re young and retain it as they get older, they’ll be doing their brains a great service well into old age.
- Some Legal Documents Require a Cursive Signature
A friend of mine works in an office and had a younger person come in to sign some documents.
They gave them the clipboard with the pages attached and then noticed, some minutes later, the young person struggling.
It turned out that person had never learned cursive, and so they were really at a loss as to how to sign their own name.
While the trend is toward printing as a signature, some old-school documents will always require a cursive one, with the printed name on a different line.
- Cursive Can Help Students with Disabilities Learn to Read and Write
Because some printed letters look very similar – especially b and d – dyslexic students can have difficulty mastering reading and writing.
However, lowercase b and d in cursive look quite different – making it much easier for dyslexic students to decipher which letter is which.
From there, cursive can help students who are dyslexic improve the fluidity of their reading and writing, making them more confident and bolstering their self-esteem.
- Cursive Connects Kids to History
Whether they’re studying the Declaration of Independence or simply going through their grandma’s old recipes, the ability to read cursive connects kids to history.
There was a period when many of the historical figures in the Western world wrote almost entirely in cursive.
The ability to see and read these historical documents, letters, etc., as they were written – not printed out on a card – is vastly important to studying centuries before.
Then there is the kids’ own personal, familial history; if they don’t learn cursive, they might not be able to read the Christmas cards grandparents send them or old letters.
- Learning The Cursive Alphabet Can Help Students Spell Better
In much the same fashion as recall, writing in cursive also improves students’ ability to spell words.
Because of the sensory experiences kids are undergoing and the brain’s neural activity, not only are kids recalling what they write more clearly, but they’re also remembering how they wrote it.
Writing In Cursive Improves Recall
A 2020 study done by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, led by Audrey Van der Meer, found that writing in cursive helps improve recall[4].
“Writing by hand creates much more activity in the sensorimotor parts of the brain,” Van der Meer writes.
“These sensory experiences create contact between different parts of the brain and open the brain up for learning.”
Young students are not only pressing the pencil to paper; they’re seeing the letters formed and sounding out the letters or words while writing.
This, in turn, helps them remember what they were writing more clearly.
- Writing In Cursive Builds Fine Motor Skills
While many of us who write in cursive as adults hardly think about the movements of our pen, it wasn’t always so.
In fact, if you were to go back to when you were learning cursive, you were probably quite slow and concentrating hard.
That’s good, though – it means your brain was working to send signals to your hand to write those loopy, slanted letters.
Learning cursive helps children develop their fine motor skills – after all, they even hold the pencil differently, and the eye/hand coordination needed is delicate.
- Writing In Cursive Is Good for The Brain
While it is difficult to create a control for cursive versus printing in an experimental setting, some studies have shown that, while handwriting, in general, is good for the brain, cursive is best.
And in young children, whose brains are still developing, “more neurons fire in different ways than printing.”
So, the young brain, as it encounters new information, creates new and different neural pathways when it studies cursive.
And with repetition and lots of practice, those neural pathways can become permanent, leading to a better, more well-rounded brain in childhood and beyond.
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Footnotes:
[1] 46 Types of Schools: With 21 You Likely Didn’t Know Existed – January 2024 -https://mondaymandala.com/types-of-schools/
[2] Step Away from the keyboard. Handwriting benefits both Young and Adult Brains. – https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/handwriting-brain-benefits-children-adults-schools-keyboards.html
[3] Why Cursive Handwriting is Still Important in Today’s Society – https://writesteps.com/cursive-handwriting-still-important-todays-society/.
[4] Norwegian Neuroscientist Says Handwriting Is Better Than Typing for Students – https://scoonews.com/news/news-norwegian-neuroscientist-says-handwriting-is-better-than-typing-for-students-10371
