Schedule TourGreetings and thank you for checking out our KIDSPACE blog! We really feel that this blog grants us a unique opportunity to share with you the abundant and joyful learning that is going on each day in the Robins’ class.
How Do Young Children Learn To Write?
Like most of a young child’s development, learning to write happens in stages. As children begin to explore writing, they are demonstrating a desire to communicate and an awareness that written words convey meaning. The image below illustrates how young children’s writing evolves over time. Writing begins as scribbles before letter like shapes can be recognized. Eventually, children include more and more letters of the alphabet and as they start to make connections between letters and sounds they begin to invent their own spelling.
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Writing in the Robins…
One of our goals in the Robins class is to provide our students with numerous and diverse opportunities for hands-on learning. We believe that preschool aged children in a thoughtfully orchestrated environment can and will direct their own learning by means of discovery. Writing is no exception! Our goal is to provide the Robins with a learning environment rich with many different types of print and plenty of opportunities to incorporate writing in their play. Below are just a few examples of how we are exploring writing in our classroom.
One could argue that the first and most important thing we learn to write is our name. Throughout the course of the day, the Robins are given many opportunities to see their name and practice writing it.
One of the ways children are encouraged to write is by seeing others write. Children especially love seeing their own words written down and read back to them. You will see a lot of this in our classroom, whether we’re writing down ideas during a class discussion, writing the children’s words in their own creative stories, or adding captions to their journal entries.
As most of you know, we have a bucket filling board in the middle room where the Robins can write notes to put in their friends “buckets”. When we originally thought of this our primary goal was to use the bucket filling board as a way to foster a a sense of community in the Robins class. We had no idea it would lead to so much writing! Each day we see the Robins sitting down to write notes in hopes of making their classmates smile. This has proved to be such an amazing and meaningful way for the children to discover writing.
Until next time,
Miss Crystal & Miss Julie