Let Little Children Write Things Badly
Little kids write the worst things, don’t they? As a parent, you may be somewhat apprehensive or even tempted to reach for your teacher’s red pen, but you know that “invented spelling” is perfectly normal and may even be the key to early reading success.
A study published this year in the journal Developmental Psychology found that children in kindergarten who made more “independent attempts at drawing words on paper” – mostly those who tried to write words using only their knowledge of letter sounds – had stronger literacy skills in first grade. The findings seem to confirm what some educators have preached for years: storytelling and focused writing are what makes reading skills flourish, not flashcards, worksheets, and letters of the week.
In Psychology Today, Dr. J. Richard Gentry, author of Teaching Your Child to Read and Write – From Child to 7 , explains what happens in the brains of children when they write naturally :
When coming up with spelling, the child engages in mental reflection and practice with words, not just memorization. This strategy reinforces neural pathways as the reader / writer becomes more sophisticated in the invented spelling, he or she simultaneously develops a repertoire of more and more correctly spelled words. These words are stored in the word-form region of the brain, where the child can automatically extract them as words to read and ultimately as well-written words to write.
This means that kids who feel motivated to write letters to their friends, grocery lists, or stories about their pet hamsters may just go for it. Educators thought that before children could learn to read and write, they needed to learn the mechanics of language. But now there is a new movement to get rid of endless memorized word lists. In her new book The Most Important Year: Preschool and the Future of Our Children, journalist Suzanne Buffard argues that, despite the importance of “visual words” , they have “tremendous impact in some classrooms.” She explains in the book:
The problem is that children who know a hundred words by sight may still lack another key component of reading: reading comprehension. Out of context, words mean nothing. This is why it is more difficult for adults to remember a list of words to read than a shopping list or a group of words combined with visual representations. It also explains why children who come across random words find it difficult to use them correctly.
Takeaway: Immerse kids in the language, and when they learn to write, they will eventually learn to write too. Gentry explains how this process works: “Over time, a word like an eagle that a child might want to write will be represented first as random letters, then as E or EG, then as EGL, then as EGUL and finally given teacher. scaffolding and related writing instructions such as eagle . ” (And for Orphists like my father, there’s always a spell checker.)
Let your young children control their thoughts. And save the best ones so they can read 20 years from now.