New.

This school year, Kentucky students are required to learn cursive handwriting.

Many of them will be learning what's called the new American cursive, a simplified version of the flowery cursive writing that was taught in the past.

Our Kelsey Starke sat down with Iris Hatfield, the handwriting specialist who created this brand new type of cursive writing.

This is your passion handwriting, and you are a specialist who has created this program.

But in this digital age, why do you think this skill is so important still for for students right now?

Yes, that's a great question.

There are many reasons why it's still important for our young students to learn to write in cursive.

We want them to be able to read documents, family, information the rest of their life.

But cursive is faster than the stop and start of printing, so they can get their thoughts down quicker, than just writing a printing it out.

Also, it stimulates the brain as they are learning the different letters.

The scientific information that's coming out now is so exciting.

How much it lights up the brain as they are writing as opposed to tapping on a keyboard.

And there's all kinds of research out there, and I've got some of the, newer, studies on the website, New American cursive.com.

You can go there.

It is, a method that when they learn cursive, they are also learning other things.

They're learning to focus.

It gets them off of the screen and they can learn to focus, to write, to pay attention to detail, to, get some benefits from learning the letters.

It helps with reading.

It helps with spelling.

The words are in one unit as opposed to the stop and start of printing.

So they build that muscle memory and that makes it faster for them.

Cursive writing is just one educational development we'll be talking about in a brand new episode of the Ktrk series, Education Matters.

We'll also take a look at new ways of teaching kids to read.

You can watch the science of literacy.

Education matters.

It debuts Monday at 9 p.m. Eastern Time, 8 p.m. central, right here on KETV.