{"id":491,"date":"2014-06-14T06:15:12","date_gmt":"2014-06-14T11:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bfhhandwriting.com\/blog\/?p=491"},"modified":"2016-04-17T07:51:36","modified_gmt":"2016-04-17T12:51:36","slug":"always-something-new-to-learn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bfhhandwriting.com\/blog\/always-something-new-to-learn\/","title":{"rendered":"Always Something New to Learn!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I relearned something! I say relearned because several years ago Dr. Rosemary Sassoon, a renowned handwriting expert and author of numerous books on the subject, told me, \u201cDon\u2019t trace.\u201d Sounded good, but how to teach children to write without a model? I still use a model, but try to keep tracing to a bare minimum. Now after reading these three paragraphs in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/06\/03\/science\/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html\">New York Times article<\/a>, mentioned in my last blog, Take Care with Cursive, I\u2019ll change my ways.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A 2012 study led by Karin James, a psychologist at Indiana University, lent support to that view. Children who had not yet learned to read and write were presented with a letter or a shape on an index card and asked to reproduce it in one of three ways: trace the image on a page with a dotted outline, draw it on a blank white sheet, or type it on a computer. They were then placed in a brain scanner and shown the image again.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers found that the initial duplication process mattered a great deal. When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write: the left fusiform gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior parietal cortex.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect. The activation was significantly weaker.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I won\u2019t throw the model out all together, but it won\u2019t get introduced until children learn the alphanumeric characters. It should not be hard to show a letter with a little verbal instruction about where to start making it. I don\u2019t want letters to start at the bottom if they should start at the top, and neither should any teacher.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I relearned something! I say relearned because several years ago Dr. Rosemary Sassoon, a renowned handwriting expert and author of numerous books on the subject, told me, \u201cDon\u2019t trace.\u201d Sounded good, but how to teach children to write without a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bfhhandwriting.com\/blog\/always-something-new-to-learn\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,10,4,3,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beginners","category-directional-movement","category-education","category-news","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bfhhandwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bfhhandwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bfhhandwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bfhhandwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bfhhandwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bfhhandwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":553,"href":"https:\/\/bfhhandwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491\/revisions\/553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bfhhandwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bfhhandwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bfhhandwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}