Early+Years+Writers

= Early Years Writers =

Each child goes through a developmental continuum related to writing from playing with drawing with an increasing number of symbols, to writing narrative and exploratory texts to convey a message. Features of the stages of writing from beginning to extended writing are below: Beginning writing- writing occurs in large circle shapes or in scribble lines proceeding from left to right, they explore the writing they have observed from adults, such as a flowing cursive form in a continuous line. Sometimes numbers and letter shapes appear individually.

Early emergent writing- children explore the use of symbols to represent words, the separation of pictures and letter symbols is a big leap in development.

Emergent writing- they begin to make more letter like shapes, although there may be space between the letters they begin to represent sounds in words, eg PPL for people. Sometimes there will be stings of repeated letters, as the child begins to refine the way they write the letter an d is often writing in lines from left to write.

Early writing- children continue to create and invent the spelling of words, they often repeat phrases and sentences as if they were practising what they already know. They know the difference between capital and lowercase letters and spacing between words becomes consis tent. Children know that there are different genres to writing.

Transitional writing- the volume of writing increases an d there are often repetitive sentences, punctuation is well developed. In narrative writing it may be more episodic and finding the perfect ending may be a challenge.

Extended writing- punctuation and writing resembles that of an adult, spelling is accurate most of the time and children learn to use different text types for the intended audience.

** Text Types **
Once children begin to develop their writing they start to experience different text types based on the intended audience and the conte xt of what they are writing. Common text types used in literacy are:

Recount- to retell past experiences and tell what happened, can be personal retellings of an activity, factual retellings of a science experiment or news report.

Narrative- to entertain, to teach or to extend the readers imagination, usually begins by introducing the setting, the characters and a hint of a possible complication. Narratives can be fairytales, legends, plays, adventure stories, realistic fiction and cartoons.

Procedure- it describes the way to do things, is often used when writing recipes and for directions on how to do or make something. There is a list of materials and linking words linked to time are used as well.

Report- to organise and store information about a class of things. Information reports have a structure based on description, question/answer, problem/solution, description is the simplest kind of report.

Explanation- to explain how something works or to give reasons for how something came to be. They are often found in scientific texts explaining how weather works and the formation of clouds.

Exposition- to take a position on some issue and justify it. The goal is to persuade someone to your point of view. Expository texts are concerned with the analysis, interpretation and evaluation of the world around us, they are often one sided and focuses on persuading the reader to one point of view.

Hannah's Observation:
==== - When doing my early years learner profile child A's writing was emergent, the child had refined the shapes of the letters, although some of the letters were written backwards mainly Y and E. Her writing was left to right along the page and from top to bottom. Her writing wasn't in a straight line due to her being focused on forming the letters and what she was writing. ==== ==== - When out on placement the class I was in did a lesson on newspaper features and procedural texts which by the end of the lesson they had a better understanding of each of these different text types. ====

- Through out my observation, I monitored a great range of writing samples, experienced different text types and was exposed to the different phases of literacy development.
==== - Child A’s writing was early emergent writing. The letters were very basic, and it was hard to distinguish letter features. Child A’s writing however, was a begging of his writing journey. You could see evident of the child trying to emulate the letters look as though, what was in his head, he was actually writing. I was able to re write the child sentence and have him read it back to me. He was able to read most of the words back and pick out the words I asked. This help the child to recognize and re enforce the word and the how it looks on paper. ====

Madi's observation:
==== - When doing my early years learner profile Child A, who was in grade prep, was not able to write yet. She was able to confidently copy letters that she saw but was not sure of what the letters were. Child A used pictures to make understanding of the text and to show what she thought the meaning of the text was. ==== ==== - Whilst on observation i observed years 3-6 as the attempted persuasive writing. They started with the basics of learning all of the terminology and reading practice persuasive texts in different forms before they attempted to write their own persuasive text. ====

Wendy's observation:
==== What I have learnt from from my engagement with early years learners that children writing abilities and motivation vary from child to child. Most children go through predictable stages of writing development and a drawing is a communication of a child's cognitive processes and considered as early writing. For children to know that writing goes linear across the page tells us that the child understands a lot about writing. My Child A from my learner profile was a grade two student and was at the stage of Transitional in the Phases in Literacy. She wrote a narrative sample of writing that had a complex plot and characters but still needs to work on her use of capital letters. ====

Through our observations we all saw various stages of writing development, across the different year levels. We also saw different text types being used in the classrooms, which helped displayed what the children knew about each text type and further developed their writing skills.