Jaime S. Reflection (Graves Ch. 17)

Long ago, when I was in elementary school, writing legible was very important. I remember receiving letter grades for having legible handwriting. I'm not sure if all teachers realize the importance of having neat penmanship. Students will have to take the HSA writing test and if their writing is illegible, they'll receive a low score. One of my students at Kapalama has really bad handwriting and during his parent conference, my mentor told his mom that he will need to write neater otherwise he'll do poorly on the writing portion. The "scorers??" (people who score the tests) will not try and make out the words like I do, they'll just give him a low score.

I think children need to realize the importance of writing neatly. They need to know that when they write something, the first thing the reader will notice is the script. If the writing is messy, the reader might assume that it's not a good paper or that the writing is not worth reading. I volunteer in my daughter's kindergarten classroom and I was shocked that some of the students couldn't hold the pencil properly. Her teacher has them use the grips and it seems to help them. Her goal was to have them off the grips by the end of the year. (I'm not sure if she meant this year or the end of the school year) But I hope they'll be able to write without the grips by the end of this year.