Writing is a critical foundational literacy skill for preschool and kindergarten and has received increased attention in research and policy as a result. Further, the nature of literacy more broadly is shifting towards more digital forms and formats. Research suggests that children approach tasks with and without technology differently and…

Drawing and writing are two major representational systems with many common aspects. Each also has its own system of rules, characterized by different degrees of visual realism and conventionality. The relationship between them at their emergence and the contribution of perceptual and motor skills to their development have been under-investigated,…

Preschool children often confuse letters with their mirror images when they try to read and write. Mirror confusion seems to occur more often in line with the direction of script (e.g., left-to-right for the Latin alphabetic script), suggesting that the processing of letter orientation and text directionality may be interrelated in preliterate…

Preschool teachers' read-aloud and writing practices were investigated using a questionnaire about how activities were planned and organized, and what their purpose was. The results indicate that early literacy practices were not planned systematically. Most of the preschool teachers (77%) reported having storybook read-alouds at least three times…

Early literacy screening tools are often a critical component of schools' intervention frameworks. As the use of screening tools becomes more prevalent for identifying students who may be at risk for learning difficulties and in need of additional instruction, it is important to continuously evaluate teachers' implementation of these screening…

This collective case study sought to investigate the distinctive writing processes and productions of young writers within the space of a writers' workshop. Based on video-taped observations, fieldnotes, writing samples, and teacher and student interviews, a description of preschool students' writing processes began to unfold. Some might consider…

This article describes how preschool-age children can engage with recipes as a genre for reading, writing, and play. This formative/design study was conducted by a teacher researcher partnership in a linguistically and socioeconomically diverse public early learning center. Through home engagements, the research team identified cooking as a site…

This article describes the processes and outcomes of a research project exploring children's motivation to write, undertaken by four pre-primary teachers in Western Australia. The teachers adopted a sociocultural theoretical framework using child centred participatory methodology, in which 109 children aged between five and six years shared their…

This study describes the early writing environments of 16 preschool classrooms in China and 155 Chinese preschoolers' early writing skills as assessed through name writing, word dictation, and early composing tasks. The classroom early writing environment consists of children's accessibility to writing materials, and teachers' writing instruction.…

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…

Writing gives children a way to share their voices and ideas with the world. Even in early childhood, the purpose of writing is to communicate. All young children have messages to share, and writing is one tool they can use to communicate those messages. For young children, it is quite challenging to form and remember messages while also figuring…

Despite the importance of collaboration in schools, few studies have examined interprofessional education (IPE) interventions for graduate speech-language pathology (SLP) students designed to prepare them with the skills necessary to effectively work on school-based teams. The current pilot study implemented a five-week practice-based IPE…

Many young children engage independently and/or collaboratively in self-initiated digital experiences. These experiences vary and may include digital play or gaming, web searching, communication with others, and with curriculum and entertainment-related content. Yet children's digital experiences are contingent upon the design of the technologies…

The study's aims were to (a) evaluate preschoolers' use of private speech (overt talk to themselves) during spelling; and (b) study how it is affected by the nature of orthography. Participants were 197 Hebrew speaking Israeli preschoolers (109 girls and 88 boys) (M = 5.6 years). Children spelled 12 words (N =44 letters) that represented one of…

Factors of graphomotor skills may serve as indicators to determine a writer's handwriting proficiency or acclimation to different writing surface textures. This study examines differences in children's graphomotor skills based on types of writing medium and gender. Participants were 97 six-year-old Korean preschool children who had not received…