Ten Ways to Encourage Preschool Writers

I wrote a post on early writing last year in which I cited the seminal work of Harste, Woodward and Burke (1984) on early writing. They concluded that most children know the difference between reading and writing by age 3, and begin to develop an understanding of written language well before they arrive at school. Children demonstrate this understanding in their scribbles and their attempts to write and draw. Harste, Woodward and Burke put to one side traditional developmental notions that once assumed that children couldn't write until they were at least 5 years old. They suggested that children, at least from age 3, begin to demonstrate elements of authoring; they called this the "authoring cycle". Their research established that the early scribble and 'writing' of very young children demonstrated:

• Organization (evidence of conventions and the genesis of cognitive processes similar to adults)
• Intentionality (evidence that the children know that their marks signify something)
• "Generativeness" (that they were attempting to make meaning)
• Risk-taking (they were trying things they hadn't before)
• An understanding that language has social function (it was for a purpose)
• Awareness that context matters in language (the situation is related to what you and write and how you use it)
• That one's scribbles and later words form a text or unit of meaning (they seemed to realise that the sum of the elements collectively mean something)

I suggested in my earlier post that this research should encourage parents and Preschool teachers to:

• Take children's early drawing and scribble seriously - look at it, enjoy it, discuss it with your children (e.g. "What's this?" "What does this mean?" etc).
• Encourage children to write - give them blank paper and tell them to "write"!
• Let them see you writing and talk about your writing.
• Look for patterns in children's early drawing and scribble and expect to learn things about your child from it.
• In short, encourage writing just as much as you encourage reading and celebrate their drawing and 'writing' - put it on the wall, date it and keep it, make up a folder etc.

Top Ten Ways to Help Young Writers

I thought I'd add some more practical suggestions to my earlier thoughts on early writing. If you were to accept the findings of this research what might you do to help your preschool children to become writers? Here ten simple ideas.

1. Read to your children - It is from hearing the stories of others that children learn about language, story and the joy that words can bring. The seedbed of writing is the richness of early reading and narrative experiences.

2. Immerse your children in language - talk to your children, sing them songs, teach them nursery rhymes, engage in word and sound play, experiment with sound.

3. Tell them stories - it is as you tell (rather than read) stories, no matter how poor, that your children witness the composing process and gain an insight into how writers structure stories in their heads.

4. Show your children that pictures symbolise and represent other things - encourage them to draw and ask them to explain their drawings - What have you drawn? What does this mean? Tell me about it. Show them that multiple pictures can be used to tell a story.

5. Teach them that drawing and art can take many forms - introduce them to painting, drawing, collage, and modelling with playdough.


6. Encourage your children to use toy animals, their dolls, teddies, television programs, Thomas Trains and so on to tell or even retell stories. This is composing in its earliest form.

7. Begin to associate written words with your children's early art, scribble, modelling and so on. Show them that we can use words to record meanings, add additional richness of meaning, and record and complement one creative form with another.

8. Incidentally draw your children's attention to letters of the alphabet as they encounter them on TV, in books and in the world all around them. Show them words and demonstrate how to write them. Do this in response to their efforts tell, retell and record experiences.

9. Give your children paper and encourage them to write. This might consist of drawing, some letter formation, simple words, scribble and so on. This varied and mixed use of symbols, pictures, colour, shape and line is early writing.

10. Display their early efforts and celebrate their 'authorship' demonstrated in their drawings and early writing.

The above suggestions are not meant to be sequential, but rather are ten examples of how interactions with your children can support them as early writers to gain a sense of what it means to compose, and begin to feel like an author as they record their thoughts, observations, responses and meanings.

Basic Literacy Support 3: Is Phonics all we need?

As a parent, one could be forgiven for being confused about the best way to teach young children to read. I've been studying early reading for 35+ years and while we've managed to learn lots of things about literacy and language from research, few new understandings have been gained about the best methods to teach literacy. Good teachers have always known what is required. Public debate tends to make pretty simple stuff complicated. The debate seems to end up being distilled into two major competing claims - it's either about phonics (decoding words) or whole language (reading 'real' stories).

One approach stresses the learning of reading from part to whole (first learn sounds, then words then read longer texts). The other (often referred to as Whole Language) stresses the need for children to encounter language in the form of stories or non-fiction, and assumes that decoding and other language skills are learned as children read. Few teachers actually believe either of these extreme views, but much public debate is stimulated by a minority of teachers, academics, doctors, psychologists, businessmen, and parents who do.

In this post I want to do just two things:

Stress what young readers need to experience if they are to learn to read successfully.
Outline some basics about phonics.

1. What do young children need to experience to learn to read?

First, you need to understand that children first begin the process of learning to read from birth. The child who arrives at school aged five ready to take off in reading has usually experienced many things. They've had parents and caregivers who have:

* spoken to them, listened to them, asked them questions, and answered their questions - from birth children should experience almost constant immersion in language;
* read to them, shown them what it is to write, and generally allowed their child to see literacy demonstrated in varied forms;
* actively tried to get their child to look at print and make sense of it - at first this might have involved pointing to symbols (e.g. the McDonalds logo "M"), encouraging them to recognise the names of TV shows from the symbols (e.g. ABC Kids) and so on. In such households children have been introduced to the fact that language can be represented by symbols as well as the spoken word;
* taught them songs, rhymes, chants, limericks, jokes (e.g. Knock, knock...). This trains memory and teaches key aspects of language (rhythm, intonation, phrasing etc);
* provided them with varied experiences in which language has been a vital and integral part;
* taught letter names, numbers and perhaps some sounds;
* encouraged them to 'read along' with books, predicting from the pictures, looking for key details and events from the pictures, looking at publishing devices such as enlarged letters, coloured print to provide impact, thought balloons etc;
* encouraged them to predict repetitive language patterns in some picture books - "But where is the Green sheep?";
* drawn their attention to print everywhere in their environment.

Children who have experienced the above find reading easier when they get to school. Children who haven't experienced this will struggle in comparison.

2. How do I help my child to be better at decoding (phonics)?

The ability to decode words is obviously a critical part of reading. How is this learned? Is there only one way? Decoding is what most people know as phonics - the ability to sound out words. Knowing that letters represent sounds and when put together that these make words. My website has a detailed overview of common approaches to phonics for teachers and interested parents, but below I've provide a basic overview on how to help your child.

You can begin some simple phonics and whole word recognition from about age 4. This should happen naturally if you’ve been doing all of the things I talk about above. Some children will be ready earlier than others but once they reach 5 you should more systematically focus on print. But be careful, if you have your child sitting down to ‘do school’ as a preschooler, then you run the risk that you might make reading more difficult and take all the joy out of it (with obvious negative long-term impact). Experiencing the joy of books and language is still the main task of any parent. But here’s a sequence that can be used for phonics:

a) Teach some consonants (e.g. b, t, c, s, g, s, m, f, l) – try to make it fun. Use the letter name as well as the sound. “Look, that’s a ‘b’.” “Can you see the ‘r’ in Rebecca?”.

While you’re pointing out letters teach a few whole words. For example, their name, mum, dad, kids (as in ABC Kids), STOP etc.

Point to letters, numbers and words as you read things and also write them down with them and encourage them to write as well.

b) Introduce the vowels (a, e, i, o, u) – while you can point to the vowels separately these are better introduced as part of words or in combination with consonants. “That says ‘u’ in mum”. “Let’s look for some ‘at’ words on this page”. “Let’s write some ‘at’ words together.” You might even sound out special words in stories. For example, in books that use sound words you should say them and point to them. “Mr McGee is saying OWWWW and OOOOO”. “Look, that says BANG”.

c) Point out other print conventions – as your child begins to learn more about written language he/she will have lots of questions that you should try to answer. As well, you might point out punctuation, the difference between upper and lower case letters. You might label their drawings with words they give you to describe their creations. Read the words back to them and encourage them to likewise.

d) Play games that use words, sounds and numbers – Word BINGO and I Spy are simple examples but there are many commercial examples. Many games can make car trips seem shorter and act as a catalyst for families doing things togethers (including brothers and sisters).

e) Other sounds and words – your child’s responsiveness to reading will determine how much more that you will need to do before school, but in the first two years of school most children should learn all the sounds commonly encountered in written language. If you want a more detailed and comprehensive overview you can visit my website for more information.

Basic Literacy Support 2: Some great resources

My colleague Brian Cambourne from the University of Wollongong has reminded me that the National Council for Teachers of English (an international organisation for teachers based in the USA) has some great resources for teachers and parents. I have placed a link on the sidebar for the parent section of the organisation (there are plenty of resources for teacher too which I'll highlight in a future post), but I thought I would highlight some of the following useful links for parents and teachers:

Helping children to become better writers.
Helping children to become better readers.
Tips for parents to help their teenagers write better (you need to download this one as a PDF document).

Another brilliant resource is the Read.Write.Think section of the NCTE site. While those of us in the southern hemisphere (the top of the world!) will find that some of the ideas have a north American flavour, there are some great suggestions for holiday, weekend or after school activities. It's a shame I didn't post this before the Australian Summer vacation ended. This very helpfully provides ideas by grade and age group. Given the variations in the use of grade names and the different starting ages for children (see my last post), I'd suggest you choose the right section by age, not grades.

Basic literacy support: Reading with children

When parents ask what they can do to help their children at home, my most common first response is "Read to and with them". While people are often looking for more complex answers there is no more fundamental way to support literacy. There are two related reasons for this:

First, time on task is important for success in anything. One of the most basic insights from literacy research in the 1960s and 1970s was the repeated observation by researchers like the late Dame Marie Clay in New Zealand and Richard Allington in the USA that struggling readers read less than successful readers. Less books and only about one third of the words. This doesn't seem too startling, but think about it. If a child is struggling with reading, how do they catch up with other children by doing less reading? The answer is that they don't! The gap gets wider.

Second, being read to and with an adult offers many opportunities for learning. Mem Fox talks about children needing to be read at least 1,000 books before the age of five to be successful readers. While we could quibble over the precise number, the principle is clear. Being read to teaches much about language (vocabulary, how language works at the sentence and text levels, the sounds and rhythms of language and so on, concepts of print and how it works), knowledge of the world and positive experiences with books.

The key is that reading should be enjoyable and the child needs to feel successful.

Over the next few posts I'll offer some basic advice (primarily for parents) about reading to, reading with and listening to children as they read. Much of this same advice can be found in my book written for with Lynne Munsie, titled Beyond Tokenism: Parents as partners in literacy. Note that this book is meant for teachers who want to help parents to support their children and was an outcome of our research on familiy literacy. It is not written for parents.


Reading to..

• Read early - at least from birth (yes some parents even read when their child is in the womb).
• Read often - at least daily.
• Make it special - treat books as if they are precious, anticipate reading as if it's the most special time of the day and make the text an extension of a warm and loving relationship.
• Choose books carefully - think about the things your children like, talk to other parents about books that kids like, consult lists like my list of 200 Great books.
• If you can, read the book before you read it to your children - reading out loud is a performance.
• Try to read the book with emotion, with invented sound effects, with different voices for characters and the narrator, changes in voice volume and tone.
• Be physically engaged - point to pictures (or parts of pictures) as you read, point to text devices and features.
• Make connections as you read with other books, experiences, TV etc (don't overdo this) - "This is a bit like the story....", "This is a bit like Daddy doing.....", "This sounds like...".
• Talk after you finish the book - again don't overdo it, it's all about response and reflection, it's not a comprehension test. "Did you like...?" "Don't you think this was like...?"

The above comments are written with parents of young preschool in mind, but the principles are pretty much the same for children of all ages. You can read to your children until at least 10-12 years of age. It will be less regular with older children and it is likely that you'll share the reading rather than just reading to them. But the basics are still read regularly and often > making it special > choosing books carefully and with your child in mind (or help them to choose) > reading as well as you can > being physically and emotionally engaged > making connections with other books and experiences > encouraging response.