Wisconsin schools teach penmanship despite standards change

EAU CLAIRE — Some Wisconsin students are still learning cursive, even though it's not required in the Common Core education standards.

Elementary students in the Eau Claire school district, Chippewa Falls school district, Altoona school and Regis Catholic Schools all learn cursive, the Leader-Telegram reported.

"Some districts in some states have gone away with teaching cursive," said Laurie Haus, the Eau Claire school districts' literacy academic services coordinator. "I think people hear those things and they just assume it's everywhere."



Haus said practicing handwriting and cursive is done in the context of other learning.

"There is instruction, but we try not to spend a lot of instructional time practicing it in workbooks," she said. "We embed it in the regular classes so we can make the best use of our time."

She noted that classroom time for handwriting and cursive is shared with keyboarding lessons, which are introduced in third grade in the Eau Claire and Altoona school districts.

"That is the reason we now introduce cursive in second grade, to take some of the load off of third grade teachers," Haus said of Eau Claire schools.

Chippewa Falls school district's director of curriculum, Jennifer Starck, said that while handwriting and cursive remain embedded in elementary school curriculum, the district places less emphasis on it than it once did.

"We don't emphasize it all the way through in the same way that we had," she said.