Writing Development

When I think back to my early years as a writer, I never remember not being able to express what I was trying to say. This is because writers develop through a process of pictures, scribbles, and then letter forming.

Children begin communicating through drawing because they have not learned how to write letters or form words quite yet. After the drawing stage, children begin scribbling. Scribbling is the child’s form of writing, which is a step closer to forming real words. Children then begin to make formations of letters, although they may still be scribbles. Then children begin early steps of word formation and writing by using the letters in their own name or familiar words to create letter strings. These sometimes look to resemble words, but are usually just the same letters mixed up and repeated multiple times. Then students begin to write using invented spelling, or writing the way that they hear the words. This is one of the first stages where we begin to understand the written language of children. Lastly, children gain enough practice and background knowledge to begin writing with conventional spelling, or how we as adults write.

This long process of writing is very important to understand as a teacher because we cannot expect our young students to automatically be able to communicate through writing. It is unreasonable to expect young students to write about their favorite things, but it would be more reasonable to ask the young students to draw their favorite things, because that would most likely be accomplishable by the young students.

Our book describes several strategies for which to teach writing development from as early as infancy through third grade. One strategy that I have been taught from my other classes that the book also describes is to ask students about their work and to ask the students to talk about or describe their work. It is very important to not ask exactly what a particular drawing or symbol means or represents because children are encouraged to explore their drawing and writing abilities and figure out for themselves if the markings they have made represent certain letters or pictures. What is one way that we as teachers can assess early writing abilities but still encourage our students to explore their own creativity?

Teaching writing development is a very daunting task, and I admit that I am not entirely prepared to teach my students how to read and write, but the strategies from our chapter really do open my mind to how teaching writing development looks like. Have you seen any of these strategies mentioned or used in your practicum experience at Apple Tree? I know I ask students if they would like to describe their drawings to me, but are there other ways I can encourage writing development in the classroom?