September 20, 2008

Teaching Toddlers to write- (Part 1) Learning Sentence Structure

Dominique Education upper and lower case, Writing

The above 2 pages are from Ryan’s school books. He did it in class during the last term. His school has started on slowly introducing the kids to writing in sentences.

The way of progression

Filling in the blanks at the end of the sentence
Eg: My name is Ryan.
Filling in half the sentence
Eg: I am four years old.
Copying the whole sentence 3 times
Eg: I smell with my nose. (x3)

Through this simple exercise the kids were introduce to sentence structure and what they should be writing about given the topic-Getting to Know Myself.

It is easier to start your kid writing on topics that they are familiar with like Myself and my family as it would be easier for them to describe based on their own experience and prior knowledge.

It is also a good time to explain to them certain basic rules of capitalization- capital letters are used as the first letter of a sentence, a proper noun, or a proper adjective and for initials or abbreviations.

It is definitely beyond their ability to understand the meaning of nouns and adjectives at this stage. However to simply the grammar rules to them I tell Ryan that he should use only uppercase at the start of each sentence and the 1st alphabet to his name instead of writing everything in uppercase as he does now.

To him he feels that it is ‘cool’ to WRITE EVERYTHING IN UPPERCASE but it is not the proper way to write. Writing in uppercase is normally used to highlight a point and not done for fun. Well I guess I will have to slowly correct this ‘mistake ‘ of his. 🙂

Tune in to the next post where I share the resources I use to elicit sentences.

Teaching Toddlers to Write

Last week Ryan came back from school with his termly workfile. Inside the file were worksheets and booklets that he had completed in the past few months. While browsing through his work I was amazed that at Nursery 1 they have started to teach the children how to write in simple sentences. Back when I was a kid we were only taught our ABCs at a much later age.

Looking at his work it got me thinking that I needed to start teaching him the basics of writing now instead of waiting till he was much older. I have to start teaching him the skills needed to write proficiently.

Browsing through the notes that I used to explain essay writing to my students I revisited the different websites that I referred to back then and how it could the lesson plan could be simplified to suit the needs of a 4-5yr old.

Since Ryan has already learned and fully understood Uppercase and Lowercase alphabets and can read phonetically most words independently I feel that it is the right time that I start him on something more advance letter writing.

For the past few months we have been sending short e-mails to his aunt in USA. Ryan absolutely loves typing at the keyboard and sending the e-mails. Now is the time to work on actual writing of letters as he still needs to work on his handwriting skills.

In the next week I will be starting another short 5 part series. This time it would be on how I plan to teach the writing skills to Ryan and be sharing with all the resources that I will be using.

Stay Tuned!!