An Interesting Article on the Importance of Handwriting
June 6, 2014

At Forest Bluff School, we are dedicated to helping each child develop beautiful penmanship. As educators with many collective years of experience, we have observed that children in the process of learning to write are doing more than just learning to reproduce letters on paper; they are strengthening the connection between hand and brain and building their intelligence in a unique way that keyboarding simply cannot reproduce. Maria Konnikova, in her New York Times article, "What's Lost as Handwriting Fades," summarizes several recent studies that affirm these observations.

An elementary aged boy works with a Montessori grammar box to label parts of speech
By Margaret J. Kelley January 24, 2026
The pervasiveness of technology in our culture brings the support of technology in our everyday lives. Thanks to tools such as autocorrect, proofreading, ChatGPT, and other on-line sites, any piece of writing can be thoroughly checked and edited for grammar. They make corrections and suggestions, ensuring that documents are properly vetted before being shared in any format. These incredible and useful tools have had the secondary effect of a greater reliance on them for writing. Now, students and adults alike are inclined to depend on technology to fix their grammar rather than learning how to get it right in the first place. To a certain extent, it is helpful to have assistance in fine-tuning work. But issues arise when people simply stop learning how to utilize correct grammar. Thankfully, a Montessori education has a comprehensive and engaging curriculum for teaching the intricacies of grammar to students. It starts at age five, with concrete experiences with the function of words, and ends at age twelve, with elaborate sentence analysis. Then, in seventh and eighth grade, students have opportunities to rigorously apply the lessons they have learned in the more complicated projects they produce at this age.
Two Montessori students observe a sunflower growing in their class garden.
By Lina Bhatia December 24, 2025
A Forest Bluff School graduate reflects on her Montessori education and the skills and traits it helped her to develop as she looks to her future in the rapidly evolving workplace.