Can young children really learn to write?

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So let's talk about really young children. Let's say kindergarten through grade two. And often people will say, well, they're too young to be able to write. They can't even write words. Their writing in those grades is probably all about teaching them handwriting and spelling, and I think that's wrong. Critical thinking, tech structure, sentence development, writing craft. These are all things that young children can begin to learn early on. The big difference is a lot of it's going to be through oral language. So let's take the topic of sentences. A lot of the activities that help develop syntactic awareness — things like sentence combining, sentence anagrams, elaborating a short sentence by using question words like "who," "what," "why," "where," "when" ... that can be done by having the students explain verbally what it is that they want to say or how they want to elaborate. Same is true when it comes to the stages of the writing process.

Students have to think a lot. And so the way they do that when they're young children is they might not have a written planner, but they are speaking out loud what they want to say. They share it with a teacher, they share it with a peer. Then when it comes to writing, they're going to express themselves before they're able to actually write words. They're going to express themselves through their drawing. And the more students can put into the drawing, the more they're able to get across what they want to say. And, you know, you think about young children who give you a very simple drawing, and then you say, "What do you want to say with this drawing? What's going on in this drawing?" And if you ask them to orally explain, they go on and on, and it's like there's a lot of details and they had a lot to say and they're able to express it through the drawing.

Here's where revision comes in. All revision is about adding something or making it better. So if you're a writer, you make your sentences better, you elaborate them, you add more information so that the reader understands what you want to say. Well, that has an equivalent with young children's drawing. If you say to them, "Boy, you've got a lot in this drawing already. But I can tell you you've got a lot more to say. Is there one more thing you can add to the drawing?" Let's say the student is talking about the boy and the boy had a cap, a baseball cap, and you say, "I don't see a baseball cap here. Can you add that?" And then you follow it up by saying, "That's how we revise our drawings. And when you get older and start writing sentences and paragraphs, you are going to be able to do the same thing." So there are a lot of parallels with things that we associate with upper grades writing that really can begin as early as kindergarten to grade two.