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Welcome to

Reading Night

Cracking the Code to Engage in Reading

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Writing

one sentence at a time

Supporting writing at home

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Outcomes

Learn about strategies to help your child with writing
Understand the importance of writing in your child’s life

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Why do we write?

Writing is an essential life skill. It has huge implications for how we participate in society.
It opens doors to educational, economic, and personal growth.
Writing is important for all aspects of school.
Writing is integrated in every subject.
We use writing to show what we know to others, and discover new ideas we hadn’t considered before

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Reading and Writing Connection

developing writing skills is closely related to developing reading skills.

Writing is a tool for thinking and learning.

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Simple View of Writing

To better understand how to support your writer at home, it helps to learn about the multiple processes that are involved when children are learning how to write.

Using your mind to manage writing tasks -- setting goals, planning , organizing, evaluating, revising

Changing spoken words in to printed words

Involves spelling, handwriting , keyboarding

Creation of thoughts and ideas and transforming them into language in written words, sentences, paragraphs, and full texts and ideas and tra into n

• Transcription: This is the act of converting spoken language into printed words. Transcribing involves spelling, handwriting, and keyboarding. In school, when you took notes while your teacher was explaining an idea to the class, you were transcribing. • Executive function: This is the ability to use your mind to manage tasks and monitor progress. In writing, this might involve setting goals, planning, organizing, evaluating, revising, and shifting your attention based on what you find. If you have ever drafted an email, read your writing, and then deleted or rewrote portions of the draft before sending it, you’ve used executive function skills.

• Text generation: This refers to the creation of thoughts and ideas and transforming them into language in written words, sentences, paragraphs, and full texts. When you wrote a response to a question from your teacher, whether it was a short-answer sentence or an entire essay, you were engaging in text generation. • Working memory: This is the limited mental space in which all these processes take place. If you’ve walked into another room to do something only to get there and completely forget what you were going to do (I know I’ve been there), then your working memory was probably overloaded.

Children just learning to write have to work really hard to develop these skills, and there is a continuum, or order, of skill development so that it is easier to learn the more complex skills later on

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Supporting your child’s writing at home

Get to know your child as a writer

Talk to your child about how they feel about writing:

Do they like to do it?
What do they like to write about?
How is writing going at school? W
Who are their favorite writers?
What do they like about books they read?

Understanding your child’s motivations and attitudes about writing can help you be better prepared to support them.

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Model writing in front of your child

Your attitude toward writing influence children’s perception of its value.

Have your child observe you while writing a thank-you note or composing an email to a friend.

Watching you write and hearing you voice aloud your thought process while writing (“I think I might need to use a different word here to show my appreciation”) can help to establish a recognition that writing is a useful and positive part of everyday life.

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Write Together

Children are more likely to engage with writing when they find it relevant and meaningful to their lives.
Collaborating with your child on a writing project (small or large)

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One sentence at a time