TOP 10 STAGES OF WRITING DEVELOPMENT(Pam Allyn)

Writing happens in stages, just as walking & talking do.

1. The Talk/Listen/Talk Loop

This is the first back-and-forth between parent and child, which is already building the child's capacity for language.

2. Play

Acting out stories(personal or imaginative). Set up a corner in your house for your child to dress up & act. Giving your child plentiful time for play is going to make him a better writer.

3. Making Pictures

Encourage your child make visual representations of people, places, special things & events in the child's life.

4. Stringing Letters

Let your child write letters of alphabet randomly. This is an important stage of writing development even if it looks incidental.

5. Labelling Drawings with Parts of Words

Your child will start to label a picture of a house with 'h' or any other letters, RH. This is a natural next step.

6. Labelling Drawings with Whole Words.

This activity will teach your child 'words & ideas connect'.

7. Drawing Connected Pictures Over Multiple Pages

Your child will return to pictures to tell a longer, more complex story. Don't stop your child because he is learning how to narrate.

8. Stringing Words

Now your child is beginning to understand adding words will create dimensions & complexity in his idea(I go park.). He will want to write stories down in exactly the same way he talks.

9. Building Sentences

You child will begin to write in complete sentences - I went to the park. This is a big step toward lifetime literacy. All the steps that come before it were the building blocks that led up to this one. Teach him to use a fullstop, a comma, a question mark to make his sentence more and more complex.

10. Making Paragraphs

Your child will learn to build paragraphs like an architect builds a house, putting all the new knowledge of sentence-making together into bigger collections of ideas.

Don't forget to applaud every small step your child takes. Foster the growth of his ability and desire to express himself in his own personal way.