Drawing and mark-making came very naturally to me when I was little. I’ve
always thought that there is a feeling that must go along with drawing; that is how
you know where the lines go. I see lines in text and images—how they connect
and intersect, and the shapes they make together. Perhaps this was a great
advantage to me when learning to write. All of my memories surrounding learning
to write involve the style of my handwriting. I do not remember being challenged
by the direction of my letters, nor the sizes and heights in relation to one
another, nor the technicalities of upper- and lower-case letters. For me, it
was about the style. It was as though I could recall words based on the
shapes their letters created together, and what the space looked like around them. I knew a word was right if it looked right, and felt right, just like drawing. As a student studying to become an
elementary teacher, I am now trying to understand the early process of reading
and writing as a form of meaning making for children.
I found it quite interesting to read that young children
often do not distinguish between drawing and writing because they both convey
meaning. It made me think back to my own early literacy experiences, where illustrating
a picture was usually much preferred over writing a story. In the article by
Kate Foley Cusumano, Every Mark on the
Page: Educating Family and Community Members about Young Children’s Writing,
she says that every mark is made for a purpose (2008). These lines, marks, and
dots have meaning together, in a system, whether it is the conventional system
that adults expect to be able to read or not. Young children are trying to
figure out their language in written form, of course they will make mistakes on
the way.
Adults, parents, and family members notice these spelling, letter,
grammar, and punctuation mistakes before anything else. Perhaps it is because
those are the only components that most people would think to look for, but
what they are looking past is all of the brave progress the child has made by
risking to write what she or he did in the first place. When a child creates
something, they do it with a purpose. And there is a lot going on. They must
structure what they are writing; they must make a decision in laying out the
page, in choosing how to orient the letters and words. They choose how to
convey a word, with invented spelling or even using the first letter to
represent a word; and they choose how to begin a story. All of these critical
decisions made by the student are evident in their work. These creative choices
are what need to be celebrated and encouraged. Think about how much more
exceedingly difficult a task becomes when you have people monitoring and
analyzing you. I would bet it is even worse when they do not know what to look
for in your work.
Cusumano said that 90% of children come to school believing
that they can write (2008). She also
said that when children are not allowed to invent their own spelling, and are
made to correct their spelling mistakes it can actually stunt the natural
development of writing skills in these young children (Cusumano, 2008). As a
future teacher, I see how communicating what we know about how children learn with
the families and parents is incredibly important for the success of our
students. Imagine the growth potential for our students if they can go home and
practice the same skills they would at school, and be supported and praised by
family members who understand their literacy journey, and can be proud of their
hidden successes along the way. By communicating, we can make this a reality.
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