Estimated read time: Less than a minute
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SALT LAKE CITY -- Educators are now finding a strong association between reading and writing. Granite District literacy coach Tricia Bromka says those students who are struggling with reading, you see it in their handwriting right away.
"They don't develop their letters correctly, there's a processing issue going on. They can't transfer what's going on in their brain onto the paper," said Bromka. "There's a huge gap there for those students who are so concentrating on what they are writing, that they can't go into those higher-order thinking skills and their fluency is jeopardized."
Bromka says they were finding students coming to college who didn't know how to write. So the new Common Core Standards have a new emphasis on publishing and writing. She says developers worked backwards from that college level into what was needed all the way to kindergarten.
Bromka says a child can't even begin to think about plot or character or arguments, if they are still struggling over each letter or word. She says a study done on fluency rate and handwriting showed students who got explicit handwriting instruction saw their fluency rates increase more than those who did not.
E-mail: mrichards@ksl.com
