Kid Writing-Overcoming Challenges

Becoming a Writer and a Teacher of Writing 

The Kid Writing professional developments offered by National Writing Project sites teach you how to be a powerful writing teacher, but it took a lot of practice for our teacher participants to become confident enough to say that they were powerful writing teachers. Explicit teacher modeling is an integral part of making the Kid Writing strategies work, and in interviews in the first half of the school year, our teacher participants stated, they weren’t 100% comfortable leading the focused mini-lessons in front of their class because they weren’t quite sure they were “doing it right.” Both of the participants even expressed a hesitancy to bring parent volunteers in because the teachers wanted to make sure they “knew what [they] was doing” before they had to show parents how to lead the small group sessions. 

Locate your National Writing Project Site here to see if they offer Kid Writing institutes.

A Note about Modeling 

When modeling writing for early elementary students, a teacher has to incorporate a variety of skills including phonics, spelling, letter formation, composition, and punctuation. The teacher has to have a strong understanding of each one of these skills and how these skills tie together to show students ways to mesh these seemingly separate pieces to produce a text. Without this understanding, the teacher cannot demonstrate how a phoneme is turned into a grapheme and graphemes are combined to form the words that make the ideas in our heads. 

This integration of skills is what our participant teachers were nervous about. Prior to implanting Kid Writing in their classroom, they had taught all of these skills separately. Handwriting had its own curriculum that had been purchased by the district, as did phonics, and reading. There was no connection between the curriculums themselves, and prior to training at the Kid Writing Institute in Philadelphia, the teachers had not been shown how to connect the curriculums, let alone lead a lesson that weaved all of them together. Keep in mind, these curriculums were from different companies and were not even originally designed to be implemented together. Moving from teaching literacy skills in isolation to teaching focused literacy lessons, then weaving them together in a Kid Writing lesson proved to be a major hurdle for the teacher participants for the first few months. 

However, even as early as our first observation in November, we saw the participants modeling this integration. We noted several examples of participants explicitly modeling both foundational and composition skills, such as stretching through words, using the word wall to spell high frequency words, adding details to narrative text, and using proper syntax in sentences.

By our second visit in February, the participants told us they had found these varied types of modeling were invaluable to the student’s progress in learning about writing. They shared verbally and in writing about how important modeling was in implementing Kid Writing in their classrooms. Selena explained, “I started Kid Writing with my kindergarteners... by modeling how to draw stories. I showed them that we could tell a story with just pictures and that pictures were a very important part of our writing.” Jill reflected by stating, “The best part of Kid Writing is the connections made between reading, writing, speaking, and listening”.

According to Zhang and Bingham (2019), children’s progress in developing writing skills can be achieved by incorporating high leverage writing instructional practices in the classroom. Some of the most effective high leverage methods include teachers’ explicit explanation of the writing process and their ongoing support of young student’s attempts at producing written text (Zhang & Bingham, 2019). The Kid Writing approach actively supports each individual child’s development by building children’s confidence and honoring them as writers. As explained in the simple view of writing (Berninger, 2000; Berninger & Graham, 1998), explicit modeling of the mechanical foundational skills needed for transcription and the higher-level composition skills used for ideation, along with self-regulation and executive function skills is necessary to help young writers develop these skills (Berninger, Vaughan, Abbott, Begay, Coleman, Curtin, Hawkins, & Graham, 2002).

Explicit modeling and scaffolding are consistently provided to students during all four steps of the Kid Writing approach. The teacher, paraprofessional, parent, or volunteer supports the child’s oral language development as they talk about their picture. The mentor helps the beginning writer with the phonemic skill of stretching through the sounds of words and shows the student the conventional format and spelling for their writing. This individualized modeling takes place in small group, whole group, and with individual students. Although it may take time for the teacher and parent volunteers to become confident in their modeling, the benefits of providing the modeling appear early on in the students’ writing. 

Placing Student Development on a Continuum 

Another concept that was new to our teacher participants was placing student writing on a continuum that aligned with their development. Before implementing Kid Writing our participant teachers had been taught to score writing based on what was missing and the assumption that all of their students should achieve a specific level of writing mastery before leaving kindergarten. Kid Writing, however, utilizes the developmental writing scale to focus on individual student development (Feldgus, Cardonick, & Gentry, 2017), rather than an end product. 

The Conventions of Writing Development Scale used in Kid Writing defines six phases of development students move through: “pre-communicative, pre-phonetic, semi-phonetic, phonetic, transitional, and conventional” (p. 147) to determine phases of early writers’ developmental abilities. Phase Observation (Ehri & McCormick, 1998, Gentry, 2008, Gentry & Gillett, 1993) helps early childhood teachers gain insight into students’ development, make instructional decisions for individual children, and inform the need for adjustments or accommodations. Development on this scale is not necessarily linear, as students may have skills in more than one phase of development at a time. Teachers use the scale to assess their students’ writing from the start of the school year through the end, marking which month the student begins to use a specific skill in their writing. Mastery of a phase is achieved when all skills in the phase are evident in the student’s writing. 

While COVID-19 prevented our participant teachers from being able to assess their students in the months of March-May, 2020, we did collect Selena’s scales in February and noted that all of the students in her classroom had mastered the skills in Level 1: Emerging. One student was in Level 2: Pictorial Plus, and the rest of the students demonstrated skills in multiple levels ranging from Level 4: Partial Phonetic 2 through Level 6: Conventional, surpassing the Kindergarten benchmark.

Outcomes 

Kid Writing is based on Linnea Ehri’s phase theory which captures the fluid emergence of literacy skills and strategies (Ehri, 1996, 2005, 2013; Ehri & Snowling, 2004). Our participant teachers found Kid Writing to be positive and empowering because they focused on what students were doing right. In her final reflection collected at the end of the school year, Selena commented, 

My favorite part of the Kid Writing process, however, was how I needed to change the way I communicated with my students about their writing to be very positive and empowering. They needed to hear what they were doing right instead of what they needed to change. 

Using the Kid Writing approach, rather than an isolated intervention (Feldgus, Cardonick, & Gentry, 2017), both teacher participants found themselves and their students utilizing all of the literary elements to compose. In her final reflection, Jill stated, “I was able to use the skills taught in phonics, guided reading, and Kid Writing interchangeably from subject to subject. The skills in Kid Writing are consistent, and that fostered significant growth in my students.” Both participant teachers also commented on how their students’ motivation to write had evolved and their students “looked forward to writing time.” They enjoyed the conferences and their ability to play helper or expert with the teacher, “which, in turn, made them better writers.” 

One of the most important outcomes of implementing Kid Writing was that the students became “confident writers who were not afraid of making mistakes.” We also saw the confidence of the teacher participants grow throughout the school year as they became more adept at designing mini lessons in alignment with student development and were able to give regular, individualized instruction. While each student in their classrooms developed at different paces, the teachers felt confident they knew how to help each student progress along the continuum at their own paces. 

“Writing is essential to communication, learning, and citizenship” (NWP, 2020). While the act of composing written text is a powerful skill, it is an extraordinarily complex task to learn that requires much time, effort, and commitment to develop. The Kid Writing approach provides teachers with the structure that meets young students at the very beginning of learning how to represent their ideas on paper and provides consistency to guide them down the path of writing development.

References

Ehri, L. C. (1996). Development of the ability to read words. In R. Barr, M. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, & P.D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research. (Vol 2, pp. 383-418). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Ehri, L. C. (2005). Development of sight word reading: Phases and findings. In M. Snowling & C. Hulme (Eds.), The science of reading: A handbook (pp. 135–154). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Ehri, L. C. (2013). Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5-21.

Ehri, L. C. & McCormick, S. (1998). Phases of word learning: Implications for instruction with delayed and disabled readers. Reading and Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 14 (2), 135-163. 

Ehri, L. C. & Snowling, M. (2004). Development variation in word recognition. In. A. C. Stone, E. R. Silliman, B.J. Ehren, & K. Apel (Eds.), Handbook of language and literacy: Development and disorders (pp. 443-460). New York, NY: Guilford Press. 

Feldgus, E. G., Cardonick, I., & Gentry, J. R. (2017). Kid writing in the 21st century: A systematic approach to phonics, spelling, and writing workshop. Los Angeles, CA: Hameray Publishing Group.

National Writing Project (NWP), (2020). Why Writing? Retrieved from: https://www.nwp.org/

Zhang, Chenyi, & Bingham, Gary E. (2019). Promoting high-leverage writing instruction through an early childhood classroom daily routine (WPI): A professional development model of early writing skills. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 49, 138-151.