Learning to read isn’t just something students do with their eyes.

They listen to sounds. Say them aloud. Connect sounds to letters. Move their hands to form those letters. Blend letters into words. Write words they recognize on the page.

In a multisensory reading program, those experiences aren’t treated as separate skills. Reading, spelling, and handwriting work together, giving students multiple ways to build and strengthen the connections that make reading possible.

That makes handwriting about much more than neat letters on a page. When students connect the letters they see and the sounds they hear with the movements they use to form those letters, handwriting becomes part of the process of learning to read.

So rather than asking whether handwriting still matters, there’s an even more interesting question to consider:

What happens when students learn to read and write at the same time?

Learning a Letter Means More Than Knowing Its Name and Sound

A letter may be a single symbol on a page, but learning it requires students to make several connections.

When students form a letter themselves, they have to pay attention to the features that make it recognizable: its lines, curves, orientation, and overall form. They aren’t simply looking at a finished letter. They’re constructing it. For a beginning reader learning to distinguish a b from a d, those details matter.

Research offers an interesting look at what may be happening during that process. In a study by James and Engelhardt, pre-literate students practiced letters in different ways, including handwriting, tracing, and typing. Using MRI scans, researchers found that students who practiced forming letters by hand showed greater activation in areas of the brain involved in recognizing and processing letters than children who practiced by tracing or typing. In other words, the experience of forming the letters themselves appeared to change how their brains responded when they later saw those letters.

Handwriting is a multifaceted learning process. It brings together visual recognition, sound, movement, and letter formation which are connections that can support the developing skills children use as they learn to read.

Handwriting Instruction Is More Than Practice on a Page

If handwriting is going to support beginning literacy, simply asking students to copy rows of letters isn’t enough.

Like other foundational skills, handwriting benefits from explicit instruction.

Teachers can model how a letter is formed, use consistent language to describe its formation, guide students as they practice, and provide immediate feedback. Over time, students move from supported practice toward forming letters accurately and independently.

A multisensory approach adds movement and sound to that process. A student hears and repeats a sound while forming the corresponding letter, for example, or practices the movement of a letter before putting pencil to paper.

The goal isn’t perfect penmanship. It’s helping the formation of letters become accurate and increasingly automatic while students are also learning what those letters represent.

As students become more fluent with print, cursive can become another part of handwriting instruction. Current research suggests building a strong foundation in print first, then introducing cursive gradually in later elementary grades, when students can apply those developing handwriting skills to spelling and written composition.

From Effortful to Automatic

Watch a student who is just learning to write a letter, and you can almost see the thinking happening.

Where do I start? Which way does the line go? What comes next?

First, letter formation requires considerable attention. With explicit instruction and repeated practice, those movements become increasingly fluent and automatic.

That matters because students have only so much attention to give to a task. When they no longer have to think through every movement required to form a letter, they can devote more attention to what they’re trying to do with those letters, whether it is to spell a word, write a sentence, or communicate an idea.

We see the same goal throughout foundational literacy instruction. Students practice letter-sound relationships and decoding until those processes become increasingly automatic, freeing more attention for meaning and comprehension.

Handwriting automaticity helps support that larger progression.

Reading and Spelling Work Together

Once students begin putting letters together to make words, the relationship between handwriting and reading becomes even easier to see.

Imagine a student is asked to write the word map. To spell it, the student:

1. Hears the word map.
2. Identifies the individual sounds: /m/ /ă/ /p/.
3. Connects each sound with the letter that represents it.
4. Writes the letters to form the word map.

That’s encoding: moving from spoken language to written language.

When the student later encounters map while reading, the process works in the other direction:

1. Sees the letters in the word.
2. Connects the letters to their sounds.
3. Blends the sounds together.
4. Recognizes the word map.

That’s decoding: moving from written language back to spoken language.

Reading and spelling are reciprocal processes. The Institute of Education Sciences recommends connecting spelling instruction with the patterns students are learning to decode so that knowledge can transfer across reading and writing.

When students spell by hand, they aren’t simply demonstrating what they know. They’re actively working through the relationships among spoken sounds, letters, and words.

Bringing Reading, Spelling, and Handwriting Together

This integration is built into the PAF Reading Program.

PAF is a multisensory foundational reading program in which reading, spelling, and handwriting are taught together in the same lesson rather than as isolated subjects. As students learn letter-sound relationships, they also learn how to form those letters. As they develop phonemic awareness and phonics knowledge, they apply that knowledge in both directions: spelling words and reading them.

The sequence is intentional because each new skill gives students another opportunity to use and reinforce what they’ve already learned.

• They hear a sound and connect it to a letter.
• They form the letter themselves.
• They use letters to spell a word.
• They encounter those same relationships when they read.

Little by little, those individual connections begin working together.

More Than Handwriting

Handwriting has an obvious outcome: eventually, students can put their thoughts onto paper.

And for beginning readers, something important happens along the way.

Every letter they learn to recognize, hear, form, spell with, and eventually read becomes part of a growing understanding of how written language works.

That’s the value of bringing reading, spelling, and handwriting together. Students aren’t learning three unrelated skills. They’re approaching the same system from different directions, and each experience helps strengthen the next.

Handwriting, then, isn’t simply something students learn alongside reading. It can be one of the ways they learn to read.

Sources & Further Reading

Datchuk, S. M., & Young, K. (2024) “Looping Back to Cursive Handwriting.” Iowa Reading Research Center, University of Iowa. IRRC

James, K. H., & Engelhardt, L. (2012) “The Effects of Handwriting Experience on Functional Brain Development in Pre-Literate Children.” Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 1(1), 32–42.

Santangelo, T., & Graham, S. (2016) “A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis of Handwriting Instruction.” Educational Psychology Review, 28, 225–265.

Graham, S., et al. (2012) Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers: A Practice Guide. Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Foorman, B., et al. (2016) Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade. Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. 

Van der Weel, F. R., & Van der Meer, A. L. H. (2024) “Handwriting but Not Typewriting Leads to Widespread Brain Connectivity: A High-Density EEG Study With Implications for the Classroom.” Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1219945.