Cursive Writing Now Required to Be Taught in California Schools

California students will have to go old school when it comes to handwriting.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation on Oct. 13 requiring cursive writing to be taught in public schools.

“This bill would require the teaching of handwriting from grades 1 to 6, inclusive, to include the teaching of cursive or combined cursive in the appropriate grades. To the extent that this bill would impose new duties on local education agencies, it would constitute a state-mandated local program,” Assembly Bill 446 reads.

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Representative Sharon Quirk-Silva introduced a bill that would require teachers to provide cursive instruction in grades one through six. A former elementary school teacher, she said The Sacramento Bee September that the purpose of the law is to give students the ability to read and write in cursive. To illustrate her point, she said that most artifacts from history, such as letters and diaries, were written in conjoined cursive.

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“A lot of historical documents going back two or three decades were actually written in cursive,” Quirk-Silva told the newspaper. “I went to 23andMe looking for some family records and they were all in italics.”

Before the new law, cursive had not been a requirement in California schools since 2010, according to CBS affiliate KFMB.

“Research has shown that cursive handwriting boosts a child’s brain development, including memory and improves fine motor skills,” Quirk-Silva told the outlet. “This bill ensures that the younger generation is equipped with the skills necessary to navigate the demands of today’s world and to connect with their history in the world of yesterday.”

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The Los Angeles County Office of Education expressed support for the law, according to SFGate, writing, “There are clear connections between the language processes of reading and the motor process of handwriting, which keyboard skills do not replicate. The mechanics of handwriting follows a sequence initiated in the brain, similar to reading – the sound is heard and processed, the letter is attached and visualized, then translated into form on the page and produced with motor skills that reinforce the direction of lines and shapes to form letters. These letters are then put together to form words and add meaning to them.”

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According to Abigail Soriano-Lentz, English curriculum coordinator for the East Side Union High School District in San Jose, California, cursive writing has long not been part of the standards, ABC affiliate KABC reported, “so we have a fair share of teachers who haven’t taught it and who they shouldn’t have taught it and some who probably didn’t learn it themselves.”

Meanwhile, San Diego County’s Oceanside Unified School District will be prepared for a learning curve involving cursive writing when the new law goes into effect in January 2024.

“We have training opportunities for our teachers. Also, with this built into the curricula, there are opportunities in their teacher handbooks to collect that information,” Vicki Gravlin, executive director of curriculum instruction for Oceanside Unified, reported KFMB.

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Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education

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