Each of the 15 students in Mollie Sweeney’s third grade class raised their dominant hand.
Sweeney, a teacher at Burrell’s Bon Air Elementary, then walked through the motions of how to write a lowercase letter in cursive. Students air-traced the motion.
Only after that did the students take pencil to paper to trace, and eventually write, cursive letters.
“I like learning cursive,” said student Margaret Cleasman, 8. “My favorite part is writing my name and learning the uppercase G. It’s the hardest letter in all of cursive.”
Those lessons will soon be replicated in elementary school classrooms across the state.
Gov. Josh Shapiro last week signed into law a bill that will require a cursive handwriting curriculum in all Pennsylvania public schools.
The governor’s office said the law will take effect 60 days after Shapiro signed the bill Wednesday.
It applies to all public and private elementary schools across the state.
The legislation was sponsored by state Rep. Dane Watro, R-Luzerne, with bipartisan support. In the memo, Watro cited research that shows learning cursive “activates areas of the brain involved in executive function, fine motor skills and working memory.”
“There’s a direct connection between cursive writing and improving reading skills,” said Sweeney, who herself learned cursive when she was in second grade in the Riverview School District. “It’s really great for fine motor skills.”
Pennsylvania joins 24 other states that require schools to teach cursive.
Burrell has taught cursive to students in third grade for the past two years, said Autumn Turk, director of curriculum and development. Prior to that, it was taught in second grade.
Turk said cursive alone doesn’t directly correlate to improved academics, but rather complements it. Handwriting instruction — and physically writing on paper with pencil — does, she said.
“As a district, we have spent the past five years learning more about the science of reading and how we can best help our students become skilled readers, writers, thinkers and learners,” Turk said. “We have learned about how important it is for a child’s brain to be activated through instruction and practice that integrates listening, reading, speaking and writing.”
The New Kensington-Arnold School District doesn’t teach cursive, said Superintendent Christopher Sefcheck, “but it won’t be hard to put in.
“We’ll sit down with our curriculum leaders and see where it fits in,” he said. “We’re in the process of revising our curriculum.”
Sefcheck anticipates cursive lessons to be implemented in first or second grades. He said he’s all for students learning cursive.
“It’s so widely used in the real world,” he said. “I think writing cursive is also going to help with literacy and reading skills. It shows the development of a child, more than just writing.”
Advocates say knowledge of cursive will help generations as they read historical documents, such as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, which were drafted in cursive.
They also note, in the age of technological advancement and artificial intelligence, a person’s signature can act as a unique identifier that would be difficult for AI to replicate.
“There’s a lot of sentimental value to signatures,” said Annette Vee, an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “They can be forged anyway — kids have been forging parents’ notes forever — but I think what signifies its meaning is that they’re socially conducted artifacts.
“It’s a revisiting of authenticity and history.”
Vee said she ran her signature through Gemini, Google’s AI assistant.
“I think it does a pretty good job,” Vee said. “I can tell it’s not mine, but someone else might not look twice.”
Penn-Trafford School District has maintained its cursive education over the years as part of its elementary school reading curriculum, Superintendent Matthew Harris said.
Students learn print handwriting in kindergarten through first grade before moving on to cursive in second grade. The district has never considered eliminating cursive lessons, he said.
“We always thought it was important and an essential skill,” Harris said.
Sweeney said cursive lessons are popular among students because it makes them feel like adults.
“I like doing my name and my friends’ names and doing different letters,” said Sully Landis, 8.