Handwriting is making a comeback in Houston schools and across the state. Currently, the majority of Texas school districts don’t teach students to write in cursive, but that will change in the 2019-2020 school year.

Second graders will learn how to write cursive letters and third graders will learn how to write complete words and answers in cursive writing. Cursive will also be a requirement in fourth and fifth grade.

The new learning standards, which the State Board of Education approved in 2017, reflect the growing science that backs the benefits of handwriting.

She explained that cursive increases the connections between the brain’s left and right hemispheres — something that printing or typing doesn’t do.

“Writing by hand helps to tie that content to their memory for faster, more efficient and stable recall later on,” Erickson said.

In February, the Houston school board adopted Learning Without Tears as its K-5

Alpha-Phonics the Book on CDRom

curriculum for handwriting, and the company helped train teachers this spring on how to teach cursive in a way that doesn’t frustrate students.

In recent years, as many states adopted a standardized curriculum, known as the Common Core, they dropped penmanship from their standards. That trend is now reversing.

“The [Texas] standards that were really beefed up to require more specific language about printing skills and then added cursive as a requirement in second grade, third, fourth and fifth grade,” Erickson said.

She said that about 13 or 14 other states are bringing cursive back to their curriculum and she expects that to continue, especially since Texas, with its large student population, often influences the textbook market.

Unfortunately Cursive Handwriting Instruction has been allowed to almost die out in Public Schools in America.  Now, realizing what a mistake that was, the schools are bringing it back.  What an unfortunate loss that has been for so many students who did not learn to write cursively.

One other problem area of need in Public Education is READING.  Reading proficiency has continued to decline in Public Education for many decades.

Over the past years many Families took matters into their own hands and taught their own children to read.  One of the most often used programs Parents chose to teach reading to their children is Alpha-Phonics.  To learn why it has been so popular for the past 33 years please click on the links below and view the short video.

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