Learning+to+Write

Children begin to learn to write usually by drawing pictures to convey their ideas to an audience. They understand that it is a way to communicate. They then progress by imitating the movements of adults, to drawing lines and squiggles. Children must learn or realise several points as they further their writing skills. These points include learning that letters and symbols mean something and that letters and symbols are different from one another. Another point to learn is that written language moves from left to right across the page and there are spaces between words (Hill, 2006). Similar to reading, children learn to write in different stages; Beginning, Early Emergent, Emergent, Early Writing, Transitional, and Extended Writing. In each of these stages the child progresses through from drawing 'scribble-like lines' (Hill, 2006, p.283), to symbols that make the sound they want, to more letters being used. They start using capital letters and spacing between words and progress to writing larger volumes of text. The final stage results in the child using punctuation, different text types for different audiences, and 'spelling is accurate most of the time' (Hill, 2006, p.286). Phonics plays a part in writing as well as reading. Children go through a stage then they begin to understand 'sound-symbol relationships' (Hill, 2001, p.12). Hill states that words can be represented by one or two letters which are usually the starting letter and a consonant or letter at the end and that mostly vowels are ignored (Hill, 2006). Children then move on to a stage where the 'writers record words using an almost perfect match of letters and sounds' (Hill, 2001, p.12), however they may revert to earlier stages when writing an unfamiliar word. Independent writers mostly use visual cues to tell if a word 'looks right' as they have a much bigger memory bank of what words should look like.