You are on page 1of 14

The following paper outlines my understanding of student

development and learning in the field of writing. Specifically, I address


the needs and experiences of beginning and developing writers in the
primary classroom. I discuss my analysis of authentic student writing
and develop plans for how a teacher could best meet their needs to
further student learning. All of the work and instruction occurred in my
kindergarten classroom in Barrow, Alaska, an Inupiaq village on the
North Slope.

University of Alaska Southeast

Analysis of Emergent Writing in the Kindergarten Classroom

Submitted to Susan Andrews


In fulfillment of Practicum III for
Literacy and Young Children
ECE 661

By

Megan Donnelly

Introduction
The writing samples presented in the following pages have all
been selected from a Kindergarten classroom at Ipalook Elementary
School in Barrow, Alaska. The classroom is composed of 18 students,
10 female and 8 male. At this point in the year, the students range in
age from 4 to 6 years old.
In this classroom, the students have studied narrative and
informational writing from Lucy Calkinss Units of Study. The students
have three hour-long writing blocks a week. Aside from the Units of
Study, students can choose to go to centers that incorporate writing,
such as: Kitchen (clipboard for taking orders, writing shopping lists and
recipes), Writing Station (writing tub of varied writing materials, paper
types, and letter writing supplies), and Teacher (dry erase boards and
markers). Students use journals regularly through out the day as
morning work, an option for early finishers, and for responding to
literature.
While the writing blocks are fairly structured, the writing that
happens during center time and in journals is more informal. As Fields,
M., Groth, L. & and Spangler, K. (2008) state, The best time to
observe childrens theories about print is during play that includes
writing materials (p. 35). For this reason, I model writing often, but
generally avoid asking my students to copy words and sentences that I
have written, and I strive to incorporate writing into as many of our

other learning activities as possible to create authentic experiences in


which writing is a means of communication.
Sample #1
This student wrote, I like to play. I like to play with your dog. In
looking at this piece, we can see a mix of capital and lowercase letters,
an attempt at spacing, text that runs left to right and top to bottom,
and a mix of sight words and words spelled using invented spelling
with a strong effort to match the sound heard with the appropriate
letter. According to the research of Richard Gentry, this students work
fits into Stage 5 of the Developmental Stages of Wring. I would argue
that this text is representative of Stage 5 because the student goes
beyond writing a single letter for each syllable, but the spacing does
not yet happen regularly between words. For example, play is
represented by two sounds in this writing and dog is written with all
of the appropriate sound letter correspondences, but the e in like
is written closer to to in both sentences. In this piece of writing, the
student demonstrates an understanding of text as a means of
communication, and I find it very interesting that the second sentence
is a piece of dialog assumes a reader. This student does not have a
dog, so there is a specific audience in this writers mind in the creation
of this writing piece. As Peter Johnston (2012) affirms, Learning is
fundamentally social. At the basic level, if a student is unable to
successfully recruit assistance or jointly participate in activities,

learning will suffer


(Loc 1158 out of
3124). As such, this
student is reaching
out in multiple ways
with this text. He
incorporates another
person by creating an
audience for the
sentence, he shares
his writing with his tablemates, and then he approaches his teacher for
yet another opportunity for feedback.
This student is an intriguing case for me. His reading is fast and
relatively accurate. His conversational speech, however, is not clear.
He incorrectly articulates /w/, /ch/, /th/, /r/ and often skips /l/ in
consonant blends. My theory for determining why he spelled play as
pa is that when he says the word, hes not articulating /l/ and hes
therefore unable to hear it when hes writing. This is partially a
developmental issue, and in speaking with the Speech and Language
Pathologist, I have learned that some of these sounds are not expected
until the age of 7. However, he does have exposure to words through
the reading and group writing that we do in class that can also help
him develop greater awareness of language. Calling attention to how

words are spelled as we encounter certain common letter patterns


during read-alouds will help his writing improve even if he cannot make
every sound in a word. Kelly Mayer (2009) discusses the beneficial
impact of writing with peers, and this student might benefit from
having a writing partnership in which he could receive feedback on his
work. Few of students in my class have picked up on the long vowel
patterns, but most of them are writing consonant blends and would be
able to help him with the /l/ in play. In addition to establishing a
writing partner to help push this student to the next level in his writing,
my plan is to continue with short bursts of one-on-one work with
phonemic segmentation and to include him in some small group
lessons on appropriate spacing between words.
Sample 2

In our writing lessons, we


have been slowly exploring Lucy
Calkins Units of Study, and the
impact of these lessons is
apparent in student work. My
students have been exposed to
Mo Willems by using Dont Let
the Pigeon Drive the Bus and
the Elephant and Piggy series as
mentor texts. Learning from Mo
Willemss example, they now
use action marks, speech
bubbles, and expressive facial expressions that are trademarks of his
texts in their own personal writing. This specific piece is a response to
a Junie B. Jones chapter book that weve been reading before dismissal
at the end of the day. Junie B. has truly captured my studentss
imaginations, and we have frequent discussions about her antics. This
student was particularly impressed by the fruitcake debacle in The
Yucky, Blucky Fruitcake.
In this writing, I notice that the student uses a capital letter to
start each of the two sentences, and there is an attempt at spacing but
its not consistent. There is evidence of letter reversal, and there is one
example of the sentence running top to bottom and another in which it

runs bottom to top. I also notice that the picture accurately


corresponds to the written text and all of the sentences run from left to
right. This student demonstrates writing at the Stage 6 level (Gentry,
1998). The student spelled all of the sight words correctly and initially
used invented spelling to write froot cacak. On the second writing, he
borrowed the book from our library and copied it to get the correct
spelling.
In terms of next steps in this childs writing, I would like to help
him build the idea of creating longer narratives. This piece is a great
snapshot of a character and scene that caught his imagination and a
wonderful demonstration of we learn to make mental pictures as
readers when we start reading text with little to no pictures. However, I
would love to see him take this technique and use it to create longer
pieces of creative writing to tell his own stories. Mayer (2009)
emphasizes the importance of a supportive writing environment and
providing motivation for writing in order to encourage children to write.
With this in mind, I would brainstorm narratives that interest this
particular student and, using Willems and Barbara Parks for inspiration,
we could brainstorm a longer retelling of a Junie B. Jones story told in
Mo Willems fashion with speech bubbles and action marks. Or, he
could be prompted to develop a story of his own creation that
incorporates a beginning, middle, and end. For this particular student,
sharing his work in the authors chair is a tremendous motivation and

an excellent way for him to receive feedback on his work. This student
also appears ready to learn some long vowel patterns, which will start
to be introduced to the whole group at the end of the month. For this
student, I will start pointing out CVCe patterns.
Sample 3
This student has a cat a home that appears often in her writing.
One of my favorite How To pieces from the current writing unit comes
from this author, and its titled How to Walk a Cat. In this piece of
journal writing, I notice a mix of capital and lowercase letters, an
attempt at spacing between words, and a period a the end of the
sentence. Her text runs from left to right, and her drawing accurately
represents the text and adds addition details and context to her work.
Just as my student in the first sample wrote about play and my
the student in my second sample wrote about Junie B. Jones, this
student wrote about something for which she has a great deal of
emotional investment and personal interest. As Celia Genishi and
Andrea Smith Honig (2009) theorize, The task (labeling a new color)
may also show that children attend to language presented in an
interactive context (p. 104). All three of my students incorporate
words and language that they experience in daily life through
authentic experiences. This theory supports my decision as a teacher
to avoid pre-selected writing prompts in favor of assisting my students

in the process of
brainstorming topics
that are of personal
interest to them.
To help this
student grow as a
writer, I believe that a
lesson on rereading
for the purpose of
adding detail to a text would be beneficial. This student shows
excellent understanding of how to structure a sentence and use words
and a picture to express an idea, and she is ready to add more
complexity to her writing. To accomplish this task, I would start by
modeling how I write about something that I enjoy doing in my daily
life. Starting with a basic sentence, I could reread with a think aloud to
brainstorm the other factors involved in this activity to increase the
length and descriptive language used in the text. In a one-on-one
session we could also talk about the kind of food the cat eats, or the
color of the bowl used. During read-alouds, we can also reflect on how
authors use language to help create mental images in our minds. In
thinking about her technical writing, this student also appears to be
ready for long vowel patterns and may benefit from highlight CVVC and

CVCe patterns that we come across in our class read-alouds as well as


her individual reading time.

Conclusion
Overall, students in this classroom enjoy writing and take great
pleasure in sharing their work with others in pairs and in the authors
chair. They believe their writing is an important way in which they
document learning and communicate with others. In fact, we went on a
field trip recently, and all of the students had pens and clipboards for
taking notes on what they learned about North Slope history and
traditions. Every student took this task seriously and wrote extensive
notes and made detailed drawings. Our tour guide was shocked and
impressed! As I moved around the hard-working group of Kindergarten
students, I saw some students drawing approximations of maps of the
borough and its villages stretching from Barrow to Point Hope while
others were creating detailed illustrations of the polar bears and owls
on display, carefully writing the English and Inupiaq names. As Genishi
and Honig (2009) observe, In terms of event representations, children
learned first the words that referred to the most meaningful events of
their daily lives (p. 103). By creating authentic experiences
surrounding language, our students will naturally be more inclined to

learn and produce language because it becomes personally meaningful


to them.
In terms of my role as their teacher, my goal is to model myself
in the vein of Marie Clay (2014) with supporting my students by
sharing the task for as long as it
takes without taking away their
independence (p. 91).
My students generally
demonstrate an
understanding how
print functions on the
page and can
accurately spell the
sight words that we
have learned in our reading
curriculum. They also show that
they understand letter sound correspondence and are often able to
stretch out the sounds in words in an accurate enough fashion that
their writing is readable by others. So, as a class, our next tasks are to
consider sentence structure, the use and function of punctuation, and
descriptive language that paints a picture for the reader.

References
Clay, Marie. (2014). By different paths to common outcomes:
Literacy learning and teaching. Auckland, New Zealand. Global
Educations Systems, Ltd.
Fields, M., Groth, L. & Spangler, K. (2008). Let's begin reading
right: A developmental approach to emergent literacy (6th ed.)
Columbus, Ohio: Merrill/Prentice Hall.
Gentry, Richard. The developmental stages of writing.
(adapted from The conventions of Writing Developmental scale, The
Wright Group). Retrieved March 12, 2016 from
http://www.sanchezclass.com/curriculum/Developmental%20Stages
%20of%20Writing.pdf.
Genishi, Celia & Honig, Andrea Smith. (2009). Childrens
Language: Learning Words from Experience. In Informing our practice:
Useful research on young childrens development. Eds. Eva L. Essa &
Melissa M. Burnham. Washington, DC: National Association for the
Education of Young Children, 2009. 101-110.
Johnston, Peter. (2012). Opening minds: Using language to
change lives. Portland, Maine. Stenhouse Publishers.
Mayer, Kelly. (2009). Emerging Knowledge about Emergent
Writing. In Informing our practice: Useful research on young childrens
development. Eds. Eva L. Essa & Melissa M. Burnham. Washington, DC:

National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2009. 111118.

You might also like