Description
As the world comes to grips with what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century, Understanding and Supporting Young Writers from Birth to 8 provides practitioners with the skills and knowledge they need to support young children effectively as they learn to write. Interweaving theory and research with everyday practice, the book offers guidance on all aspects of writing, from creating multimodal texts and building children’s vocabulary, to providing support for children who find writing particularly challenging.
With appropriate strategies to develop young children’s writing from an early age included throughout, the book discusses the role of oral language in early writing in detail and explores the key relationships between ‘drawing and talking’, ‘drawing and writing’ and ‘drawing, talking and writing’. Each chapter also features samples of writing and drawing to illustrate key points, as well as reflective questions to help the reader apply ideas in their own settings. Further topics covered include:
- progressions in children’s writing
- writing in the pre-school years
- developing authorial skills
- developing editorial skills
- teaching writing to EAL learners.
Understanding and Supporting Young Writers from Birth to 8 is a unique resource that will help early childhood educators, early years school teachers, specialist practitioners working with very young children, and students enrolled in Early Childhood or Primary Studies courses to boost their confidence in teaching young learners as they become writers.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Adria F. Klein
1 Introduction to Understanding and Supporting Young Writers from Birth to 8
Noella M. Mackenzie and Janet Scull
2 The drawing and writing journey: progressions in children’s learning
Noella M. Mackenzie
3 Preparing children for writing: birth to 2
Laura McFarland
4 Writing in the preschool years
Bridie Raban
5 Transitions and learning to write
Noella M. Mackenzie
6 Developing authorial skills: child language leading to text construction, sentence construction and vocabulary development
Janet Scull and Noella M. Mackenzie
7 Developing editorial skills: spelling
Tessa Daffern
8 Handwriting, keyboarding or both?
Noella M. Mackenzie and Rebecca Spokes
9 Assessing writing: practices to support young writers
Janet Scull
10 Teaching writing strategies
Marian Nicolazzo and Noella M. Mackenzie
11 Young children creating multimodal stories in their home, school and digital spaces
Lisa Kervin and Jessica Mantei
12 Teaching writing to EAL learners
Paul Molyneux
13 When learning to write isn’t easy
Natalie Thompson
Index
