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The Beginnings of Writing
A great strength of the book has always been the careful treatment of children's spelling development, including invented spelling. With the elimination of basal spelling programs from many classrooms, however, a number of teachers now find themselves having to construct spelling programs entirely on their own. We have tried to address this need in this edition.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
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September 25, 2016Borrowed from Karen O'Connell - A quite brilliant book on the development of 'writing' up to about age 7, but the most interesting parts of the text deal with kindergarten emergent spelling; there is an absolutely wonderful exploration of how children become aware of print-sound relationships and brilliant illustrations of emergent writing practices that make sense if you understand how the child is conceptualising strategies to spell. I had seen phonetic awareness largely as knowledge, but am beginning to understand it as a series of strategies combined with knowledge.
An example given is 'YUTS A LADE YET FEHEG AD HE KOT FLEPR' (Once a lady went fishing and she caught Flipper). The strategies are recognisable if for example you recognise the child is using the 'Letter-name' strategy that you commonly find in emergent writing - the Ys here are being used as 'w' because the letter Y is called 'wye'.
Nasal sounds are also very hard to distinguish, so are often not heard and therefore left out - in the above 'AD' is an accurate rendering of what a child at that age might hear for 'and', and again in the spelling 'FEHEG' for the 'fishing'.
There is also a brilliant deconstruction of how we make sounds in the throat and month, and many invented spellings use letters for sounds that are made very nearby to the target sound or miss out sounds made close to each other. So for example even if a child can hear the 'n' in 'went' when they spell it 'YET', the absence makes some sense if we think that when making 'n' we place the tongue in the same place where d,t,j and ch are made. So children might spell 'n' in words when it is not near d,t,j and ch, but not when these consonants are present.
Overall, I found the book brilliant in enlightening areas that I had very limited awareness of, and it was a highly enjoyable exploration of the absolute wonder of language acquisition.
An example given is 'YUTS A LADE YET FEHEG AD HE KOT FLEPR' (Once a lady went fishing and she caught Flipper). The strategies are recognisable if for example you recognise the child is using the 'Letter-name' strategy that you commonly find in emergent writing - the Ys here are being used as 'w' because the letter Y is called 'wye'.
Nasal sounds are also very hard to distinguish, so are often not heard and therefore left out - in the above 'AD' is an accurate rendering of what a child at that age might hear for 'and', and again in the spelling 'FEHEG' for the 'fishing'.
There is also a brilliant deconstruction of how we make sounds in the throat and month, and many invented spellings use letters for sounds that are made very nearby to the target sound or miss out sounds made close to each other. So for example even if a child can hear the 'n' in 'went' when they spell it 'YET', the absence makes some sense if we think that when making 'n' we place the tongue in the same place where d,t,j and ch are made. So children might spell 'n' in words when it is not near d,t,j and ch, but not when these consonants are present.
Overall, I found the book brilliant in enlightening areas that I had very limited awareness of, and it was a highly enjoyable exploration of the absolute wonder of language acquisition.
May 10, 2013
Introduced stages of writing and how children think about writing as they mature.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews