Sue Cowley explains how fostering an understanding of symbols and stories can help children learning to write to wield their pens with confidence…
Learning how to communicate their thoughts, ideas and feelings is a key aspect of children’s early development.
At first they do this orally, but gradually they also learn to do it through the written word.
In order to be able to write, children must of course master the physical skills required. But writing is a highly complex skill. To master it, children must also acquire a number of key intellectual concepts.
They must understand:
In the modern-day world, children are surrounded by signs and symbols. Learning how to extract meaning from these signs and symbols is fundamental to learning how to read and write.
You may not automatically think of letters and words (and indeed numbers) as being symbols. But that is what they are.
Each letter ‘stands for’ or symbolises a sound. Sometimes two or more letters together (a phoneme) also make a single sound (for instance, the graphemes ‘ch’ and ‘igh’).
Once a child understands these letter/sound correspondences, and how to blend them together, they unlock the symbolic code of written language. They can then learn how to read and write.
Young children very quickly gain an awareness of symbols and what they mean. Try showing the golden ‘M’ symbol used by McDonalds, or the tick used by Nike, to your children. Can they already identify these commonly seen symbols?
You can take advantage of young children’s visual awareness of symbols by incorporating them into your daily setting routine. You might use:
Our names are such a key part of what makes us unique individuals. Right from when we are tiny babies, we hear our names over and over again, often spoken by our closest and most important carers.
Parents are typically keen for early years settings to teach their children to write their names. Strike a balance between the child-initiated activities you know work best for early learning and the more formal activities that some parents may ask you to do.
We introduce our preschoolers to more formal letter formation and name-tracing activities in the final couple of terms before they move on to their Reception classes.
Using marks to ‘write’ their names is one of the first pieces of symbolic writing that your children will do. Use creative approaches to inspire and engage them, so that they really want to practise this skill. They could:
Children learn to write their names at different times. Some learn very early; others will still be learning in the Reception class.
It’s very rare for a child never to learn to write his or her name, even those children who have special educational needs.
Your children will understand many of the graphic symbols you use around the setting – the cross on your first aid box, the arrows pointing to the fire exit, the girl/boy symbols on the toilets.
Boys often seem particularly drawn to graphic representations and symbols, and enjoy using them in their own mark making.
Chinese New Year offers a great chance to practise a picture-based form of writing. Show your children the Chinese characters for ‘Happy New Year’.
Offer them black paper and red, white or silver paint, so that they can create their own version of these symbols.
Road signs are another example of graphic symbols that are all around us. Take your children on a walk to see which symbols they can identify, and what meaning they can gather.
Make your own road signs, using broom handles, cardboard and paint. Then chalk out a series of roads in your outdoor area. Children can drive the ride-on toys around the town.
Talk about why road signs use different shapes and colours – what do the children think these mean? (You’ll find a downloadable PDF of different road signs here.)
As well as being great fun to read and share, stories also offer you plenty of ways in which to develop your children’s conceptual understanding in those areas a writer needs to acquire to be successful.
Although children of this age can’t yet write a story, when they hear you read they are assimilating lots of information about what stories do, and how they do it. At a young age, children quickly learn that:
Help your children understand story structure and sequencing by drawing some story maps together with your group.
Use large size paper – A1 size flipchart paper or a long roll of plain lining paper are great for this.
Work together to draw out the main events from a story in the correct sequence. Use arrows to show how the events link together.
You can also retell the story, using a similar sequence of events, but with different characters (The Very Hungry Alligator, perhaps).
The Story Making Project is a fabulous method for telling and retelling stories via graphic representations and dramatised re-enactments.
This project has been used in our preschool and also in our local primary school for several years now. The children who have been involved with it have become accomplished storytellers.
Stories help your children acquire some vital concepts. These concepts are vital for their mark-making and writing. They also help children understanding who they are and what their place is in the world.
The concepts they will acquire through stories include:
Where children feel inspired to use mark-making to communicate, it is far more likely to come freely and easily to them. Inspire your young mark markers by offering them these exciting opportunities…
Sue Cowley is an experienced teacher, trainer and author. Her book The Road to Writing is a guide to developing mark making and writing skills with children aged 3–7 years.
