I was so intrigued by Kate Foley Cusumano's piece entitled "Every Mark on the Page...". It brought many new insights and ideas to me that can help make a student successful at writing. One aspect of this successfulness that Cusumano focuses on is the impact the parents and or community has on reviewing a child's writing. I have to admit that after looking at the kindergartender's picture of the flag and her story to go along with it I was a little lost. Even more so, what I could comprehend I only critiqued and criticized as things she was doing wrong. For example, I made note of how her writing seemed to me to be all over the page, how her spelling was not correct on a lot of words, and how I could not even decipher what point she was trying to make. As I read on, however, I learned that my analysis of the student's writing is exactly the critique Cusumano makes of parents who assess their child's writing and thinks they are not progressing as they should be.
As Cusumano went through the stages of the student's writing there was one particular theory that stuck out to me and that was the section about "Letters Hav[ing] Flexible Shapes" (Cusumano, 12). She explains that children often view letters as flexible in the way they can be shaped or the form and direction of them; this often leads to written letters that are upside down or backwards. She even notes that this flexibility is an important stage of complex learning. I often think that now-a-days teachers and parents are too quick to "diagnose" something in a child. An example here could be thinking that the child is dyslexic simply because he moves letters around. By parents and teachers being able to understand that this is an important developmental stage for children there is bound to be less medicalization of children's inabilities to do something.
Furthermore, in chapter one of Sound Systems the authors note a table that has five "Stages of Spelling Development." I could not help but categorize the kindergartener mentioned in Cusumano's piece into a stage. I predicted that she would be in State II (Letter-Name) because spellings for "was" as "wus" and "very" as "vary".
Paige, you're dead on with your mentioning of the flexibility of children's letters. I would add that a child who bothers to write a letter, no matter how mixed-up it appears to adults, is demonstrating a certain willingness to take a risk, something that's necessary for learning. Children know that adults are evaluating them informally all day long. It can be hard to make those marks when you're not really sure what all the rules are. Plenty of children don't feel confident enough and say they "can't" write letters because they're afraid of the criticizing they might get. As adults we feel it's our job to make them conform to the standard. There is certainly a time for that, but not when kids are just figuring out the basics of literacy.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much we can learn about what a child knows about writing by analyzing their spelling patterns as developing hypotheses about phonics systems. By looking closely at these unusual spellings, we can see their strategies and build upon what they are showing us they know.
ReplyDeletePaige, I was struck by the exact same thought while reading the portion of Cusunamo's article that dealt with the idea of flexible letters. How many kids get labeled as having a reading disability simply for creative spelling in the early stages of writing? I'd like to see that statistic.
ReplyDeletePaige, you and I were exactly on the same page concerning the critiques of writing. As adults, I think we often forget about the developmental process that we went through in order to become the writers that we are today. In doing so, we automatically assume that kids should write like professional authors.
ReplyDeleteHi Paige, You are so right! So many of the prek,kindergarten, and even some first graders I've worked with see letters as shapes put together. Very typical is the "stick-ball" combination which could be a b, p, or d. They often use them as interchangable and at this early level that's OK because developmentally its right where theyre supposed to be!
ReplyDelete