Young Children Can Write!

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Many young children become writers before entering kindergarten, and others pick it up during their first year of school (Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984). Children move through a series of three stages during the primary grades. At first, children scribble randomly on a page and call it “writing.” With more experience, they begin to intersperse letters in their scribbles, and line them up from left to right and from top to bottom. Children also begin to “read” or tell what their writing says. This first stage is emergent writing.

Next, in the beginning stage, children write strings of familiar letters, and their use of letters signals their new awareness of the alphabetic principle. Children use invented spelling to represent words, and as they learn more about phoneme-grapheme correspondences, their writing approximates conventional spelling. They move from writing single words to writing sentences and experiment with capital letters and punctuation marks.

The third stage is fluent writing, when children write in paragraphs and vary their writing according to genre. They use mainly correct spelling and other conventions of written language, including capital letters and punctuation marks.