Offers guidelines on helping young children develop into independent writers. Explains what to expect at different stages, such as semiphonetic and phonetic stages, drawing as a prewriting activity, and writing and revising once drawing no longer dictates writing. Offers suggestions for providing an environment that supports the writing process.…

The validity of recent research concerning invented spelling, the developmental stages in children's writing, and whether children will attempt writing before reading and continue writing while learning to read were examined. Five developmental stages in spelling have been identified: (1) the precommunicative stage, involving the use of random…

Suggests that reading and writing are not only language competencies displayed in literacy or literature but that they are the sites for analysis in emergent literacies. (DF)

Specifically intended to address the teaching of spelling, this description of an elementary school program in Australia deals with many of the pedagogical problems that arise in whole language classrooms, and suggests ways for teachers to integrate a process approach to spelling with process writing to create a total language program. Following…

In the Albion Writing Project at the State University of New York at Brockport, teachers, students, administrators, and college consultants collaborated on improving writing and writing instruction from kindergarten through grade 6. Throughout the two-year project, teachers attended inservice workshops on such general topics as the composing…

Intended for parents and teachers who are interested in the approximate level at which their primary school-age children should be writing, this document describes the type of writing children at each age can produce and how they go about producing it. An introduction makes this point and offers a set of writing process terms to describe…

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…