Emergent Writing in the Primary Grades Article

            I found this article to be helpful in that it discussed how students may in fact have characteristics within two different stages of the, “same piece of writing.” It also stated the importance of recording student’s work from the very first day of school in order to see the progress the student made by the end of the year. On the very first day of my first grade class, we completed a time capsule. This time capsule consisted of a writing piece and a drawing to go along with it. We asked the students what they had written and recorded it below in order to refer back to it in case the students were to forget. We also measured each student with a string in order to see how much the student has grown throughout the school year. I found this to be a great idea in that the teachers, students, and parents can visually see the progress that the student has made.

Throughout the classroom that I am working in, there are many posters of words as well as the student work hanging on the walls. This allows students to visually refer to the posters as well as feel a sense of confidence that their work is hanging in the classroom. While observing my student’s writing thus far, most have not applied spacing, punctuation, and capitalization. The article discussed that once the students begin to develop this, it is often times follow by a concern of spelling a word correctly. I found it also to be interesting that the article compared a student’s work in Spanish to that of English. It was amazing to see the difference as well as the Spanish influence her writing had when completing an assignment in English.