QC Council recommends more handwriting in schools

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MANILA — The Quezon City Council, through a resolution proposed by 5th District Councilor and chairperson of education, science and technology committee Jullienne Alyson Rae V. Medalla, has urged the Department of Education (DepEd) to continue to promote the use of handwriting in all public and private schools .

Councilor Medalla said that advances of technology in the past decades have made computers and state-of-the-art devices play a major role in our daily life that people, especially students, are getting dependent on these things – making handwriting activity a lower priority among young learners who are exposed to a type-to-compose procedure of learning using computers.

She added that school children are introduced to computers at an early age where they are taught how to use internet and write letters by simply pressing the keys on the keyboard thus, depleting the use of a pencil or a pen which is most useful to improve the child’s critical thinking because of its recall on ideas as they transfer transcript and take notes to a paper by hand.

The lady legislator pointed out that the practice of a copy-paste research using computers among school children hinders the relevance of the read-and-write concept of learning that taught students to expressed more ideas.

According to a study, the continuous instruction on the use of handwriting has numerous benefits for the students that range from increased literacy skills, such as reading, writing and oral language, to improve critical thinking and thought organization, Medalla said.

She added that the study also shows that students in Grades 2, 4 and 6 with class activities that involved handwriting wrote more words faster, can easily express more ideas and composed essays longer than those whose handwriting activity in class was replaced by computers.

The same study recommends that in school activities such as note-taking, answering short essay, composing stories and classes that instruct and practice penmanship should be the avenues for the promotion of handwriting until at least the 6th grade.