Early Writing
Often Referred to as: Emergent Writing
When working with young learners it’s important to know that there are many stages to early writing, and each child moves through the stages at their own pace. Early writing does not refer to children that begin writing early, rather to the beginning stages of learning to write. Every stage of writing that a child moves through is building a strong foundation for success.
Early Writing Skills Help Young Learners:
understand that scribbling and drawing is an initial step to writing
connect their thoughts and ideas with written form
prepare for future learning experiences
Stages of Writing Development
Scribbling/Drawing: Believe it or not the first stage of writing is scribbling and drawing! Some young learners begin with random marks on the paper, and others create a drawing for their thoughts. These are both used to show ideas. *Ask children to tell you what they wrote about in their work.
Letter-Like Formations: Children will begin to attempt mimicking letter formations in their writing. At times the formations may look like a letter, a number, or just random lines.
Strings of Letters: At this stage children are beginning to form letters and create random sequences to letters to represent their thinking.
Letters and Spaces: Children begin to match letters to the sounds they are writing. This can be in form of labeling a picture, or creating a sentence with spacing between words. Often this begins with initial sounds of words, followed by initial and ending sounds, then initial-medial-ending sounds.
Conventional Spelling and Writing: At this stage young learners begin to incorporate conventional spelling, spacing in between words, and punctuation.
We believe children need to be exposed to a wide range of skills that fit together to build a strong literacy foundation. We also recognize that families and teachers have the never-ending challenge of limited time. Our strategies are organized by skill, and identified as 5, 10, or 15 Minute Moments. Whether it is five minutes, or twenty minutes, whatever time is available to help foster a young one’s learning will make a huge difference!
ENGAGING STRATEGIES
Sticker Writing
Stickers are a wonderful way to work on the writing component of learning. Being able to HEAR the sounds in a word is one skill, being able to MAKE the sounds in a word is another skill, and being able to WRITE the sounds in a word is yet a third skill. The sticker acts as an object that we work to write the name of, using our letter sound knowledge. For example, the sticker of the shark, we stretched out the word SH-AR-K so we could hear the sounds at the beginning, in the middle, and then at the end. We use inventive spelling to write what we hear- so “SHRC” is the label we wrote for “SHARK!”
Sticker Labels
Here is another example of labeling using pictures. Children can choose the stickers they want to use, and then sound out the words they are writing to label each picture. The first sticker is a “scoop,” which was represented by the initial and final sounds: “SP.” The bottom sticker is “cement mixer,” which was represented by “smt mxr.”
Build a Sentence
Building a sentence can happen in written form as well. Have a child first dictate the sentence they are writing, then count the number of words in the sentence. Writing one line for each word in a sentence is a great way to have learners begin to see the separation of each word.
Daily Tasks
Every kid has tasks they need to do every morning- brushing teeth, making bed, eating breakfast, getting dressed… A fun way to help learn the tasks needed to complete, while working on letter/sounds and blending is to create a daily task chart. Simply place each task on a small sticky note, having your young learner help sound through the words to create the writing. Every day kids can refer to the sticky note tasks to see what they have already done, or what is left to do. We move the sticky notes after each task is completed.
READ THE RESEARCH
“It takes a great deal of scaffolding and support for beginning writers to help them take baby steps in writing that soon lead to great leaps in writing progress.”
“Early writing is one of the best predictors of children’s later reading success (National Early Literacy Panel [NELP], 2008). Specifically, early writing is part of a set of important foundational literacy skills that serve as necessary precursors to conventional reading (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998), including developing understandings of both print (i.e., print concept and alphabet knowledge) and sound (i.e., phonological awareness).”