Learning to write

Dr. Rowe states in the "Voice of Literacy" podcast, "all kids wont walk into the literacy doors the same way...If they aren't a procedural learner then its fine, instead let them pretend their way into writing." For example if a child is playing "restaurant" and writing down an order, that is developing progress. This idea of children learning while they play is very interesting to me because children are doing it all the time. They are learning when they are not even realizing it. I believe it is so important to let young children learn through play, and for teachers to design play into their lessons. Again, as we saw in the "Donut House" article from last week, the idea of play is being integrated into children's learning and the teachers lessons.

Children are not only learning from invented play but they are also learning from invented writing. In the article, Teaching Phonemic Awareness by Rasinski and Padak, they discuss research behind invented spelling. After research conducted with a group of first graders "who were encouraged to show invented spelling were more fluent writers and better word recognizers than children who experienced a traditional spelling curriculum". While in the lower grade classrooms I think it is important to hold back from criticizing young children's spelling mistakes. Even if a child is spelling the word incorrectly at first it is still showing a great deal of learning.

After seeing the writing sample from the kindergarten student in the article Every Mark on the Page: Educating Family and Community members about Young Children's writing, it brought me back to an experience of my own last year in a Kindergarten class. I remember while I was helping out in the beginning of the year many of the students were becoming familiar with the alphabet and learning to write all of the letters. Many times I remember telling students the "correct" way of spelling a word as they wrote in their journals, however after reading about invented spelling I look back and realize that I should have just let the students continue spelling the words how they interpreted them. Another mistake I caught myself doing was reading a students writing and asking what they meant to write. After reading the article, a great way to figure out what a kindergartner is writing, can be to ask the student to read it out-loud. I think that overall it is important to encourage students early on in their writing, even though they make mistakes.
Another important way to help students write is by educating the parents. I love the idea of sending newsletters to parents informing them about different ways to incorporate writing at home.