If you read the post “Read the Playroom” you sat back and learned from your child’s abilities to “write.” Today, you are going to do the writing while your little one dictates/tells you what to write. This process is called shared writing and teachers use this all the time to model handwriting and introduce concepts of writing.
Put a poster on the wall at your child’s eye level and tell him/her that you want to make up a recipe together, maybe even one you could pretend to cook after. You need the titles Ingredients and Directions: Let your little one come up with the ingredients and the directions as you write them out. But the key here is to TEACH while you write. You are displaying their words for the household to see so you have that platform to teach while you model the writing process.
Teach them:
1) To start writing on the top, left side so that you will not run out of room. A lot of times I ask my students before I start writing “Should I start on this side (pointing to the right side)? What about down here? Why not?” to get them thinking about why we start writing at the top left.
2) To write one word at a time, leaving nice-size spaces between words.
3) To listen for the sound at the beginning of the words.
Each time you do a writing activity like this with your child, it instills a foundation of print concepts and extends their understandings each time.
I will talk about more print concepts to teach for the writing process in a future writing post.
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