Teaching Writing in New Ways March 4, 2008

In Peggy Campbell-Rush’s book, Reading, Writing and Wrod Walls: Strategies to Boost Literacy Skills in All Learners, she presents many strategies that are attractive to children in Early Childhood learning how to write. She states that there are three ways writting occurs in the classrooom, which she refers to as “I do it, We do it, You do it.” The three ways are demonstation writing, where the teacher writes on a paper or board infront of the entire class and talks out her thought process, interactive writing, where the students work together with the teacher to creat a piece of writing, and independent writing, where the students work seperately with the help of the teacher where needed. This cycle of decreasing individuality is common in the educational theories studied in teacher certification programs. The goal is to have the child learn to write on their own gradually until they do not need the assistance of the teacher at all. One of her strategies that I found interesting was “Labeling The Room.” She suggests that the students go around the room and pick objects that they want to label and attempt to sound out the words on a label card. At a younger level she explains that the students simply draw a picture of the object and write the first letter of the word they are labeling. I found this interesting because almost every Early Childhood classroom has the objects in the room labeled, but I never considered having the children label the objects in the room. My only objection to this is that other students looking at these labels might learn to spell the words incorectly if the students who made the labels spelled them incorrectly. To alleviate this problem I might put the correct spelling ontop of the students spelling. Another interesting thing that Peggy Campbell talks about is using index cards to document any story that a student tells the teacher as they come in in the morning so that they can use this sentence to write about later in there journals or at any other time. She also talks about finding any real life application of writing possible. One of her examples was writing thank you notes to the custodian in their school. This method is interesting because children always enjoy writing more when they know that someone is going to read their writing and they want to convey a message to them.