These slides accompanied a talk I gave recently for the Potomac Association of Cooperative Teachers http://pactconference.org/

1. Teaching Children
to Write from the Start: Ability,
Culture, Meaning and Mechanics
October 17, 2012

5. An Overview
• An interactive conversation
– You are the experts on the children at your school
• Some background about writing and writing
development

6. Why focus on writing?
• Writing is a key element of
academic success.
• Writing is a powerful learning
too that supports both
understanding and
remembering.
• Writing is a key ability for full
participation in the 21st century.

7. 2 out of 3 U.S. students fail
to meet grade level demands
in writing.

8. When does writing
begin?

9. • After children learn to read?
• When they begin to write words
conventionally?

10. A Different Perspective
• Literacy development begins long before
formal schooling
• Children learn about reading and writing
simultaneously in their everyday
experiences

11. Children’s literacy is
constructive and multi-
modal

12. Learning to write is about cognitive
development and social
participation

13. Children engage in writing to
explore the characteristics of
writing materials
the cognitive development

14. Children write to engage
in positive interactions
with adults and to form
relationships with peers
the social participation

15. What motivates children to learn
to walk and talk? To learn
anything?

16. By what mechanisms
do children learn to
walk and talk? Do
children learn
anything?

18. Focus on Engagement

19. The Basic Skills
• Spelling and punctuation
• Thinking, memory, and language
a(speaking), plus fine motor skills

20. Children’s handwriting develops
sequentially “through stages of
drawing, scribbling, the making of
letterlike forms, moving to well-
learned units, invented spelling,
and conventional orthography”
(Boscolo, 2008)

21. Scribbling

22. Drawing

23. Random
Letters

24. Invented
spelling

25. Conventional
Spelling

26. Writing before schooling can best be
described as exploration …
But … there’s more

27. • What hypotheses do children develop
about writing prior to entering school?
• How do children being to manage and use
multiple sign systems?

31. Identify the background knowledge
that all children possess … learning
revolves around the child’s mind
not the teachers.

39. Not convention but intention

40. In school
children learn what they are taught.
So focus on the multiple purposes for
writing like …

44. Authentic Purposes (Brainstrom)

45. Authentic Purposes
• Telling what I’ve learned (reports)
• Describing an experience (travel writing)
• Keeping notes (journaling)
• Comparing ideas (reviews)
• Conducting research (creating knowledge)
• Analyzing problems (making the world a better
place)
• Sharing happiness and wisdom (fictional
narratives)
• Introducing an important person (profiles)

47. Create an
environment for
writing

48. Create a Writing Center
– Provide supplies and journals
• Everyone gets their own journal binders work very well
– Most important ingredient is YOU (close and
sustained support)
– Open ended and semi-structured
– Lots of “prewriting”
• Lists
• Maps
• Proto writing
• Name writing

49. Integrating writing with art

52. Linking reading and writing

54. What happened in “Click Clack
Moo Cows That Type”?

58. Strategies
• Write every day
• Revisit and reread
• Share the writing as a group
• Letter tracing
• Name writing

59. Name Writing
• A window into children’s emergent writing
• The child’s name is often the first word they
begin to write
• The child first learns to recognize letters in
their name, especially the first letter (own
name advantage)

60. Name writing tends to progress in
the following manner:
• (a) scribble; (b) linear scribble; (c) separate
symbols, with letter-like forms; (d) name
written with correct letters and
mockletters/symbols; (e) name generally
correct, with some letters reversed or
omitted; and (f ) name written correctly

62. Use Name Writing with Self-
Portraits
Look for lots of little transitions

63. Strategies
• Focus on what’s RIGHT!
• It is the act of writing that needs
encouragement
• Write with your students

64. Strategies
• Extrinsic rewards??
• Using mentor texts
– Supplied by both teacher and child
• Share what You write
• Celebrate writing
• Writing floats on a sea of talk

66. Evaluation
• Respond to completion
• Respond to pride of authorship
• Encourage students to try out ideas

67. Freedom of Choice
• Varying the amounts and types of input
– Experiment
– Let’s spend the next few minutes writing anything
we want

68. What are the most important
elements of of written language
that children need to learn?

69. Conventions or mechanics

70. Conventions and mechanics

72. Beginning
• Does a story have a beginning?
• Does everything have a beginning?

73. Middle
• What comes after the beginning?
• Does a story have a middle?
• Do you remember what happened in the
middle?
• The Climax is the final event in the middle
before the problem is solved or resolved?

74. End
• Does a story have an end?
• What happened at the end?

75. Retelling
• Guided
• Individual

76. Pictures, key words, and mapping

77. Beginning 1/4
Middle 1/2
End 1/4

78. • Have the children label the parts
• Draw pictures to illustrate the things that they
think are important in each part of the story

79. Retell the story using the pictures

80. Key words
• K-2 Ask and write down the words the
children say
• 3-5 – Use questions
• Who were the main characters? Where were
they? Was there a problem? What was it?

81. Beginning
Key words
Max, wolf suit, mother, Wild Thing, “I’ll eat you up!” bed
Middle
Room, Max, forst, tamed, ocean, magic, boat, trick, sailed, kind,
wild things, wild rumpus, roared, lonely
End
Home, supper, room, hot

82. Rewriting the model story
• Once the children have had enough
experience so they understand the basic parts
and can retell the story, they will be able to
rewrite it using their own words.

83. Write an original story
• What is a story?
• What are the parts of a story?

84. Instructions
• Now that you’ve learned so much about the
parts of a story you will enjoy writing your
own story. Let’s write a story together. It can
be funny, or spooky, or you can write an
animal story, or one about your family and
friends. The only thing you need to remember
is that your story must have a beginning, a
middle, and an end.

85. Thank you for your attention