story by Claire Miller
Teachers in preschool settings and elementary schools typically work with different sets of academic standards when teaching writing skills to students.
While preschool standards often focus on teaching transcription skills, especially handwriting, elementary school teachers tend to emphasize composing beyond the word level.
In a paper published in the Early Childhood Education Journal, Clinical Assistant Professor Rebecca Rohloff Clough and Gary Bingham, the Hettie Floyd Lee Professor of Young Learners in Urban Settings, recommend that educators more closely connect the standards between preschool and elementary school for a more continuous learning experience across grade levels.
To do this, Clough and Bingham offer several strategies that can be implemented in classrooms with children ages 3-6 to make writing instruction more seamless.
Preschool classrooms often use dictation, where children tell their teachers what they want written on their paper. Building on this strategy, teachers can ask students to draw and write along with dictation, try phonetically spelling the words they want to write, and discuss the different ways people use writing in their daily lives.
Teachers can also use materials in their classrooms to foster students’ writing skills. Alphabet charts showing how to write and sound out letters can be displayed on the wall, and teachers can hand out sheets with a line listed for every word a student plans to write on the page. They can also provide markers, crayons, chalk and other writing materials in play areas to encourage children to incorporate writing into their play.
Educators can also give bilingual and multilingual students opportunities to write in their home languages and share how words and sentences are composed in those languages. “These experiences can help position multilingual children as experts during group writing activities and highlight the rich linguistic and cultural experiences they bring to school each day,” the authors wrote.
Clough and Bingham note that these strategies can create a more comprehensive approach to writing instruction that supports students at all writing levels.
“Writing is a multidimensional process, and teachers can leverage the strengths of both the preschool writing standards and early elementary writing standards to provide writing experiences that address all components of writing,” they wrote. “By applying these strategies, teachers can address the needs and interests of the unique writers in their classrooms.”