Early Writing

Writing begins with making marks - which could even be with a spoon in a bowl of custard. Children will then move stages gradually exploring different kinds of marks like around and around or up and down. They will also be noticing letters - particularly the letters in their name. We will be modelling writing for them for example by writing their name on their work or modelling writing a phrase at story time. Children will begin to build up a repertoire of letters and then use them for writing. We call this stage emergent writing.
Young emergent writers know that you can record talk in writing, they want to write, they know that writing means something and they do their own writing. This starts with so-called scribbles, moves on to scribbles going left to right, then to letter-like marks and to strings of letters, which is what we can see in this piece of work. Children will later go on to try and record the sounds heard at the beginning of words using their early phonic knowledge.