Category: Writing

Your child’s letter reversal habit should not immediately be a cause for concern – it is not necessarily a sign of your child having dyslexia, as it is commonly assumed. Many practical initiatives can be used to curb your child’s habit. 

Letter reversal is the inability to remember the correct direction in which letters, such as ‘d’ and ‘b’ or ‘n’ and ‘u’ should be written. It is most common amongst children below the age of 7. However, it can become a habit for older kids, too. 

Read on to find out about some practical solutions to help prevent letter reversals. 

Teaching Your Child Cursive 

Although it may seem like a huge step forward, teaching your child how to write in cursive and teaching them what letters connect and how may help imprint in their mind the direction each letter is supposed to go. Read more about how to teach your child cursive here.

Multisensory Tactics 

Sometimes, visual learning is not enough for writing, and the prevention of letter reversals and multisensory tactics need to be employed. This could be any number of things, including air writing, which helps the child feel the letters forming in the air by moving their body and big hand motions. 

Sand writing allows the child to see the letters physically forming and feel the motion of their formation. Other methods include letter magnets and sandpaper letters. Find out more about multisensory tactics here. 

Visual Activities 

One of the easiest ways to prevent letter reversals is by introducing lots of visual activities, such as connect-the-dots, wooden block games, and matching games. This can help children strengthen their memory through repetition, while connect-the-dots activities could help improve finger memory and the child’s visual perceptual skills.

Group Letters Together 

Finally, another way to help stop letter reversal habits is by teaching letters in groups and making sure that letters that are commonly reversed, such as ‘d’ and ‘b,’ are in different groups. That way, the child will recognize the difference between the similar letters and, hopefully, not get confused. 

It could also be a good idea to give each of these groups a different color so that the child will associate a specific color with a particular letter direction. You could even go a step further by coloring every line involved in a letter a different color. 

Concluding Thoughts

Hopefully, the suggestions above help prevent your child from dealing with letter reversals in the future. The strategies may take some time and may even require a combination of a few of them to produce notable results.

Children often showcase a natural talent or inclination for communication via writing. Monitoring attempts at drawing, mark-making, mock writing, and proper writing can provide evidence of a student’s early grasp of literacy. 

Emergent writing involves the phase that children go through where they start to share their thoughts on paper. It takes place alongside their early grasp of reading, and we’ll be taking a more in-depth look at the usefulness of emergent writing in this article. Read on to learn more. 

Early Writing & Its Developmental Stages

Children usually move through stages of early writing and mark-making. Here are a few of them:

Scribbling – this phase usually happens at about 1½ to 2½ years, and in it, children make big circles and lines and usually grip their writing tool in a fist. Scribbling is about motor activity and experimentation rather than a meaningful depiction of thoughts and ideas. 

Pre-writing, meaningful mark-making – at 2½ to 3½ years, children will begin this phase with shapes and scribbles that are more intentional, and they will often say what their markings represent out loud. There is no distinction between drawing and writing.

Pre-writing, strings of letters and letter-like forms – at 3½ to 5 years, children may begin to ‘write’ curves, dots, and lines that resemble letters, or they may write proper letters in random orders. They’ll often ‘read’ what has been ‘written,’ and these efforts represent their early understanding that writing is used to convey meaning. 

Invented spelling – in this phase, which occurs at 5 to 7 years old, children will try to write words by creating letters for the sounds they hear. 

Conventional spelling – from age six and beyond, children grow more accurate in their written representation of verbal sounds, learn how to spell high-frequency words and other words correctly, and accumulate knowledge of common spelling patterns. It becomes easier to read their writing as a result. 

The Benefits Of Invented Spelling

Many argue that encouraging ‘incorrect’ invented spelling will slow a child’s literacy growth or encourage bad habits. Invented spelling is proven to supplement learning to read, and while teaching proper spelling is important, encouraging invented spelling in early stages can have many benefits. 

By saying words and carefully listening to their sounds, children can improve their phonemic awareness. By associating letters to the sounds that they are hearing, children practice useful phonics skills for reading. 

Spelling Stages

The spelling attempts that children make and their error patterns in the conventional and invented spelling stages are useful for understanding the phonics knowledge and phonological awareness they possess. Their spelling in these stages will predictably progress. 

Concluding Thoughts

Emergent writing can be a fantastic tool to understand your child’s phonic, literary, and writing development, and it should be encouraged in all its stages.

“Writing is, by nature, an opportunity for creativity and personal expression. When writing is incorporated in learning and assessment, there is increased opportunity to produce the ideal situation for active, attentive learning” – J. Willis, “Writing and the Brain: Neuroscience Shows the Pathways to Learning”

The written word is everything to our brains. It is the intake of information, the passing of ideas. It’s no surprise that there is a type of science behind the writing, supporting everything you say and how you write.

Think about how sometimes a paragraph simply flows, the ideas connect and the whole passage just makes sense. Oppositely, you can find yourself reading the same sentence over and over again without fully comprehending exactly what is being said. According to Yellowless Douglas, the sensation does not only affect the reader but the writer as well. Our understanding is based on the idea of clarity, continuity, coherence, concision, and cadence.

Why does this matter? Well when you write a book, you want it to be understood. You want to leave an impact on your reader, make them remember what you wrote.

Writing something memorable takes more than simply hoping for your paragraphs to flow, it takes the precise placement and creation of a connection.

What happens exactly? Where you place your important information will affect when, and if, the reader remembers it. We have to work with an idea called “recency,” that the last thing mentioned is what we will remember the best. That’s why whatever you tell them in the middle of the paragraph should not be as important as what you mention in the end.

It comes in handy when describing a bad situation. Put the worst information, or situation, in the middle of the paragraph. When you do this and then end the paragraph with something a little less offensive, like a petty insult. Ending with the insult takes the brunt of the negative reaction caused by the middle of the paragraph.

How do we create the connection? The same way we connect everything else. Cause and effect. We don’t want to skip straight to the result, we want to know how we got there. Mention the reason for the failure, let the reader understand why and connect to those experiences.

When they understand the reason, they’re more likely to accept the explanation of the situation. It’s when you jump straight into the failure you get them all riled. Then instead of reason, all you have is an excuse.

Stay engaged. If you want your readers to follow your writing, you need to write in a way they understand. As the University of Florida puts it, “we expect the order of items in a sentence to reflect the order in which they occurred in the world” and when the sentence fits this order, the brain of the reader shows more activity.

The way we think affects the way we read, the way we read affects how writers should write. When the brain is engaged by the content, the reader takes away information efficiently and effectively.

Are you a teacher that wants to help your students become better writers? Well, you have come to the right place. In this piece, we will discuss 16 writing concepts that teachers need to know and understand in order to make their students better writers.

Argumentative Writing- A style of writing that uses forms of reasoning, persuasion, as well as factual and other evidence to support one or more claims about a topic or text.

Drafting Stage- A step in the writing process in which students externalize their ideas in writing. Informal writing such as journal entries, open-ended responses, and reading strategy applications generally stop at this stage, while formal writing such as research papers continue beyond this step to all stages of the writing process.

Editing Stage- A step in the writing process focused on checking grammar and formatting.
Writing Process- A progression within the act of writing that is comprised of several stages including drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.

Formal Writing- A type of writing commonly associated with long-term projects, such as research papers or inquiry-based projects, which are usually evaluated through scoring guides also referred to as rubrics.

Informal Writing- A type of writing in the drafting stage which occurs naturally in classroom activities that involve writing short responses to an open-ended question or writing journal entries.

What is Inquiry-Based Writing- A type of formal writing used for engaging in inquiry-based learning, creative thinking, and research in content areas.

Recursive Writing Process- Within the multiple stages in the writing process, students do not simply move from one step to the next; rather, they revisit each step to complete their writing.

Revising Stage- A step in the writing process in which students modify the content based on feedback provided by peers, teachers, or their own opinions.

Publishing Stage- A step in the writing process, before submission to the teacher for evaluation, in which students review their written work, proofread, and make final edits.

Orthography- The system for the standard use of symbols for writing in a language; the conventional rules of spelling and writing in a language.

Emergent Writers- Learners in their beginning stages of writing. They are often young children engaged in experimentations with the written language, through scribbling for example, to convey a written message.

Creative Writing- A style of writing which is often rooted in the writer’s experiences, including forms such as fiction, drama, and poetry.

Composing- The author’s viewpoints on the various aspects of writing, including the expressive, poetic or imaginative, and expository elements.

Recursive Nature of Writing- The back-and-forth quality of writing. Writing is necessarily a recursive process: as the writer modifies his/her work, they often go back in their writing to rephrase or add new elements to the previously written material.

Rehearsal- A stage in the writing process in which the writer mentally reviews and tests out different versions of a piece of work before making a final selection.

What concepts did we miss?

Are you a teacher that wants to help your students become better writers? Well, you have come to the right place. In this piece, we will discuss 9 strategies that you can use in the classroom to help your students become better writers.

1. “I Wonder…” Statements- A teaching idea created to help encourage students to ask more questions and to provide a model for active thinking while reading a given text. The statements can be used with any type of text either before, during, or after the reading. The “I wonder” statements can be made orally, visually, or in writing.
2. Journals– An informal writing tool which allows students to summarize, respond to, or further explore their ideas about what they have read.
3. Quickwrites– An informal writing technique which can help ascertain students’ prior knowledge of specific topics, monitor comprehension, or summarize newly acquired knowledge. Students write what they know about a specific topic, which can then be used to determine a starting point for teaching, to evaluate student learning, and to plan future lessons.
4. What is a Tickets Out- An informal writing tool which facilitates student reflection on their learning whereby students answer two questions: (1) what is the most important thing you learned in class today? and (2) what questions do you have about what you learned today? Students respond to the first and second questions, usually, by writing their answers on the front and backside of a graphic organizer, respectively.
5. Structured Note Taking- An informal writing technique which provides a visual framework or organizer to guide students in their note-taking. The visual framework resembles the layout of the page, and some focus only on the text while others include illustrations, charts, and graphs.
6. Text Boxes- An informal writing teaching tool in which the TextBoxes visually mirror the paragraphs, diagrams, and photos on a particular page. Each Text Box has two columns: the first column contains students’ notes about key facts, and the second column contains students’ reflections about the text and questions about what they have read.
7. Investigative Journals- A medium through which students record ideas about topics they want to investigate or about their ongoing research and that promotes inquiry, reflection, and critical thinking. Students should be encouraged to begin their journal entries with “I wonder,” which can serve as the basis for peer discussions or conversations in writing.
8. Dialogue Journals- A conversation tool in which students communicate in writing on a variety of topics which may or may not be prompted. They are also known as interactive journals.
9. Teacher-Guided Writing Lessons- Class exercises for writing instruction based on the specific needs of students, which focus on distinct aspects of written language, such as spelling and punctuation, that are unfamiliar to the learners as well as broader elements of language such as prewriting, paraphrasing, and editing.

What strategies did we miss?

Are you a teacher that wants to help your students become better writers? Well, you have come to the right place. In this piece, we will discuss 12 activities that you can use in the classroom to help your students become better writers.

1. Story Impressions- An activity for the prewriting stage in which a list of words that are to be included in a story are presented as well as the order in which they should be used.
2. What is an Oral History Project- A project in which students use a variety of formats to honor and document the life history of someone of their choosing.
3. Admit Slips- An informal tool used to ascertain student knowledge, which involves students writing, on one side of either a graphic organizer or an index card, their knowledge about a particular topic and, on the other side, a question they have about that topic.
4. What are Dialogue Journals- A conversation tool in which students communicate in writing on a variety of topics which may or may not be prompted. They are also known as interactive journals.
5. Written Conversations- An informal writing activity in which students communicate their reflections with peers. A student selects an “I wonder” section from his or her Investigative Journals and shares it with another student in writing. The latter reacts to what was shared and continues the correspondence by raising any questions.
6. Transmediations– An inquiry-based writing activity in which students change the medium of a work from its original form. For example, students might transmediate a poem into a picture book or song lyrics into a story.
7. Travelogues- An inquiry-based writing activity in which students record their virtual visits to countries wherein a novel they are reading is set, a language they are studying originates, or a historic event has occurred. Travelogues can be created in various formats including a travel journal, a PowerPoint presentation, or a video.
8. Inquiring Minds-  A small-group, inquiry-based research project in which students with similar interests in specific topics work together.
9. Interactive Writing- A writing activity used to support emergent readers and writers. Learners write down sentences which the teacher reads aloud, stretching each word to help the learners distinguish between sounds and letters. The learners then write the letters or words as they repeat the sounds read aloud.
10. Collaborative Writing- A writing activity and a form of the act of writing in which students experience writing within a social context. It often involves one or more partners, and a university tutor who provide instruction or act as role models throughout the process.
11. What is Nonstructured Writing- A freeform writing activity that provides space for students to write about their interests without direct instruction and learn naturally about written forms of language.
12. Writer’s Workshop- A writing activity and composition strategy in which students are given time and space to prewrite, draft, revise, and edit their written work for publication or sharing with others.

What strategies did we miss?