One of the beauties of working from home and living 5 minutes from the elementary school is my ability to volunteer on a limited basis. My oldest son started kindergarten this year, and I volunteered to help with “kid writing.” Today we had training. Boy, was it interesting. The jist of this program is that kids draw pictures, and then “write” the story. They had a first-grader demonstrate. He had a picture of a boy and I’m not sure what else, but he said the picture said “I like fun stuff.” So then the teacher said, how do you write “I” and the boy wrote it. How do you write like, and she’d sound it out. For the end result, he wrote something like, “I like FON stof.” Then the teacher wrote “I like fun stuff.” under his words and very nicely showed him the difference between her words and his words. Then they had a kindergartener demonstrate. That was really interesting. Her picture said “I M Lk T V S.” This is what she wrote. The translation is “I am looking at the sun.” Wow, so after you get the kid to write the “sentence,” you have to write the “real” sentence. I hope it doesn’t take too long for the kid to write the sentence because by the time I have to write the “real” one, I may forget what the kid said.
This is supposedly a proven method and really helps kids learn to write. I’m not sure I entirely understand the theory behind it, but it’s not my area of expertise, so I’ll have to trust the teachers on this one. How kids learn to write is something my husband and I got into a conversation about the other night. When he writes an article, he writes his thesis statement and an outline, the way you learn in school. I was amazed. That’s a very methodical way of writing. I don’t write that way. I just start writing with a general idea in my head. Even in high school or college if I had to turn in outline or notes, I would have to “re-create” them from my rough draft. That was my beginning point with papers. And I usually aced them. I wonder how the majority of adults write? It would be interesting to find some current data on peoples’ writing process.
I’m reserving my judgement on kid writing until I experience it and see the results first-hand. I’m sure I’ll post updates as the year progresses.