Interactive writing is a powerful instructional strategy in which the teacher and children "share the pen" to construct a collaboratively composed text. Traditionally, articles have been written detailing how the procedure can be implemented in grades kindergarten through two. We contend that interactive writing can also be an effective…

Emergent bilingual children express their ideas in written language through meaningful marks on a page by leveraging their oral language and print focused skills from home and school languages. Because writing is a complex task, particularly for children learning more than one language, teachers must make decisions about how they guide children…

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the current literature regarding beginning writers, with a particular focus on the cognitive and neuropsychological research that has implications for the translation process during writing. This overview will highlight specific theories with direct relevance to translation during writing, as well as…

Much has been made by early childhood educators about the importance of activities that foster early reading--and deservedly so--but studies show that reading and writing are skills that children develop simultaneously. Early reading is supported and improved by early writing. Young children need reading to help them learn about writing, and they…

This study examined student perspectives about writing by interviewing both typically developing and struggling writers in Grades 2 through 8. The findings revealed a progressive developmental pattern of writing knowledge in which novice writers place more emphasis on the physical product and local meaning, while more experienced writers focus on…

Children in the emergent writing stage write in pre-conventional or emergent forms (scribbling, drawing, non-phonetic letterings, and phonetic spelling) before they write conventionally. A special education teacher in a kindergarten inclusion setting in the Bronx, New York, noticing that her students did not particularly like to write, decided and…

A mainstreaming project was carried out in Toronto, Canada, in which four deaf students, ages 5 through 8, were integrated into a classroom of hearing students in grades 1 and 2, for 1 hour, 5 days a week, to participate in a writing program adapting the Graves-Giacobbe process writing model outlined in Donald Graves'"Writing Teachers and…

Noting that children's perceptions of literacy and of themselves as learners differ from those of adults, this book documents how Sarah, from the ages of 2 to 5 years, understood literacy and invented reading and writing for herself. Numerous reading and writing samples in the book, organized around broad research questions, present Sarah as an…

Having implications for teachers and students at all stages of primary school, this project report delineates an alternative and more effective approach to the teaching of beginning writing. The report points out that the project, while producing a body of classroom-tested material, focused on awareness about written language and how children…

Using data collected from kindergarten and second grade children in a study of young children's concepts about writing as reflected in their school writing behaviors, this report focuses on information gathered from second grade children. The introductory chapter restates the research questions guiding the study and briefly reviews the major…