Podcast: Handwriting Is Essential—Here’s How to Teach It

Did you know there’s a strong connection between the hand and the neural circuitry of the brain? 

As students learn to write letters by hand, they also learn to recognize them more fluently. This letter recognition leads to greater letter-writing fluency, which leads to stronger overall reading development. Handwriting, the research reveals, is in fact a foundational tool for literacy. And as kids get older, the benefits continue, deepening how they process new material and encode learning.

Meanwhile, good handwriting instruction doesn’t require a huge time investment: Brief instructional lessons followed by frequent modeling and feedback for students can slip into all areas of the curriculum throughout the school day, says Brooke MacKenzie, a former elementary teacher and certified reading specialist. “Handwriting practice can and should be quick and dirty,” she says. “It's not like you need a 20-minute lesson on how to hold your pencil.”

In this episode of School of Practice, MacKenzie chats with us about four fundamental handwriting skills. Plus, she shares her top instructional secrets—from using cursive to help students struggling with print to why Kindergarteners should “talk to their pencils.”

Related resources:

• How to Teach Handwriting—and Why It Matters Teaching young students how to write by hand before moving on to keyboarding can help improve their reading fluency as well.
• The Power of Multimodal Learning (in 5 Charts) When students engage multiple senses to learn—drawing or acting out a concept, for example—they’re more likely to remember and develop a deeper understanding of the material, a large body of research shows.
• Neuroscientists Say Don’t Write Off Handwriting Brain scans reveal crucial reading circuitry flickering to life when young readers print letters and then read them. The effect largely disappears when letters are typed or traced.
• The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2025 We’re back with our roundup of the most insightful studies of the year, from the power of brain breaks to groundbreaking research on AI, cell phones, and handwriting in the classroom.
• Research: The Impact of Handwriting and Typing Practice in Children’s Letter and Word Learning: Implications for Literacy Development (2025) This study followed five-year-olds as they learned new letters and simple words, comparing children who learned by handwriting (copying or tracing) with those who learned by typing on a keyboard.
• Research: Handwriting But Not Typewriting Leads to Widespread Brain Connectivity: A High-Density EEG Study with Implications for the Classroom (2024) Researchers used brain scans to compare what happens in students’ brains when they write words by hand versus typing them on a keyboard. The results suggest that the physical act of handwriting facilitates the brain's ability to encode new information more deeply.
• Research: The Importance of Cursive Handwriting Over Typewriting for Learning in the Classroom: A High-Density EEG Study of 12-Year-Old Children and Young Adults (2020) This study compared brain activity in adults and children while they wrote words by hand, typed them on a keyboard, or drew them. Handwriting and drawing produced stronger patterns of brain activity linked to memory and learning than typing did. 
• Research: The Effects of Handwriting Experience on Functional Brain Development in Pre-literate Children (2012) This research found that the motor experience of forming letters by hand (printing or tracing) creates different patterns of brain activation than typing does. For educators, this suggests that having young children form letters manually supports robust neural development for reading and writing.
• Ghost Games (2022) Brooke MacKenzie’s “spine-tingling” short stories.