Children and Writing

After recently reading several different articles related to the use of i-thingy’s and the loss of writing as a mandatory skill in some school curricula, I am saddened. Two of my three children have experienced learning differences. Writing diffculty is part of their individual constellations. Despite all the best efforts in the world in writing long-hand, these children produce amazing results when given a keyboard of any description. I was made to write thank you notes and letters to my grandmother (best woman on the planet) by hand as a child and while I did not appreciate it at the time (surprise), I definitely do now. Writing out anything long-hand requires forward planning in a way that will most likely never be gleaned from typing with the spell-checker and syntax/grammar corrector hot on your heels. Then again, typing gets my thoughts out more rapidly and this is what my budding young authors need. Bless them, short-term memory difficulties also haunt them. So there are, as always, two sides to every coin. I would like for my children, and every child really, to enjoy writing BY HAND even if only as an archaic hobby but I also realise that the advent of technology has allowed us to move on to a different playing field and express ourselves in a different, sometimes more efficient ways. Unless, of course, it is in text speak and that is a topic for another day…