A Place to come for tips on working with your child, hear first hand stories of real children and how I’ve worked with their challenges. A place to realize that you are not alone.
Email me questions and I will respond!
July, 2026
Do you remember when we used to write letters? Or write in a journal? Or hand write lists? Maybe you still do. To show the benefit of writing, I’m sharing some conclusions from an experiment by the Norwegian neuroscientist Audrey Van der Meer, comparing handwriting versus typing. This interests me because my approach to reading includes writing by hand. When done as a practice, neural pathways are created in the brain to make reading and writing easier for children.
She writes: When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.
The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.
When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.
Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.
The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.
It also appears that when an upper school student handwrites notes from a lecture, they are better able to retain and synthesize the information than when they type notes.
I encourage us all to practice writing (and drawing), not just for beauty, but for the inner connections. One way I have worked with students who struggle with handwriting is to first write BIG, write with their feet and practice making spirals (in and out) and other forms.
This experiment doesn’t touch on cursive writing, which is a whole other exciting topic. Happy Writing!
Credit to the publication Handwriting Is Better for You, Waldorf Today, Issue 753.