Evolution of a Child's Writing

Children go through many stages of writing.  As a child goes through these stages, one realizes it is such an amazing process.  Always celebrate it!



In the beginning stages and emerging scribbles, you may not be able to tell what the child is drawing or writing.  Let them tell you about it and get excited!  Always praise your child to encourage their continued development in becoming a wonderful little writer.

As your child starts to get better hand control, you will start to see some recognizable pictures.  Encourage them to label their picture.  Pretty soon, you will start to see some "mock letters" as they begin to learn letters and sounds.

As a child begins to recognize letter - sound relationships, you will see them transition from random strings of letters to spaces between them to show "words".  As the child gets a better grasp on letter sound relationships, they begin to match sounds with their letter.  You will also see children developing writing behaviors such as writing from left to right.

Other note worthy transitions are seeing the beginning letter with other letters behind to symbolize "that's a word".  Then, the beginning and ending letters of a word.  For example for the word cat a child might write "coyt".

As students learn their high frequency words and other spelling vowels, vowel teams, digraphs, etc, they begin to transition into two word sentences.  As they start expanding their ideas from thought to paper, students will phonetically spell words too.  Let you child know this is okay!

When I teach writing to students, one of the first lessons they learn is to try and "sound it out".  If after they write it and stretch the sounds it doesn't "look right", I ask the kids to underline the word and then, come back to it.  This writing strategy helps the children focus on getting their thoughts on paper first before they lose it.  If a child's focus is primarily on spelling the word correctly in the beginning stages of writing "draft phase" I find that they lose their purpose for writing.  I have the students free write about the topic or form of writing in the draft stages.  As we move through the writing process, the students can pick and look up words later.

Here is also a great link I found that also explains the stages of writing that young children go through.  I hope you find it interesting!

"Writing Stages"
http://wwcsd.net/~goodwinm/Writingstages.htm