Parents and teachers look for ways to foster children’s writing ability without turning them off by what appears for some an onerous chore.
The Language Experience Approach to Writing
In the language experience approach children are motivated to write when the task has a meaningful purpose and is the natural consequence of an activity or personal experience.
Even before children learn to write, they tell stories and report events orally. In the language experience approach pre-writers dictate experience stories to an adult who prints their words on large chart paper. The adult may also tape record and replay their words.
The dictated story conveys to children that written symbols stand for spoken words and provides a model for oral language becoming the printed word. Seeing one’s words on a chart gives children confidence in expressing their ideas. Hearing one’s words on a tape recorder is often surprising to children.
The flow of communication in the language experience approach moves
- from children engaged in an activity or experience like bird feeding
- to children thinking about the activity or experience
- to conversing orally about the activity or experience
- to dictating orally about the activity or experience
- to reading one’s oral language as written down
- to writing one’s own words about the activity.
Stuffed Animal Reporters
Young children’s stuffed animal companions can assist in moving them from oral language to written expression. To a child each stuffed animal is a unique character with different personalities and perspectives. Children treat inanimate stuffed animals as if they were alive by talking to them.
A child can speak his experiences through his stuffed animal reporters and give each a role in reporting some facet of his experience. With stuffed animals it is easy to introduce different voices into one's writing. A tape recorder or adult can record initial reports before transferring to a printed form.
Very short experience stories might be printed on sentence strips. Strips can be arranged and rearranged into the format for a newsletter.
Parents and teachers find children delight in using stuffed animal reporters as a team of newsletter reporters. Children draft newsletters on paper to family and friends. Final drafts may be sent out by email or snail mail.
The following list of stuffed animal reporters and column topics exemplifies a five-year-old child’s first biyearly newsletter, which started in kindergarten and ended with high school graduation. By middle school most children have established their own writing identities and drop their ghostwriters.
- Panda Bear – Weather Report
- Pooh Bear – Honey Recipes
- Miss Peach – Travel
- Hoppity Rabbit – Salad Bar Gardens
- Drowser Dog – Law and Order
- Ruffles the Lamb – Recipe File
- Cinnamon Bear’s Market – At the Farmer’s Market
- Donkey’s Gallery – Art Exhibits
- Citreon the Parakeet – Feeding the Birds
- Spy the Turtle – Unraveling Mysteries
A child's newsletters in collaboration with stuffed animal reporters become a keepsake diary.
Adult writers use a writer’s clubs, story circles, or literary coach to share and get support for their current works. Children can use their dearest and closest stuffed animal companions to coach them in the writing process.
Sources
- Brown, H. Douglas. Teaching by Principles, An Integrative Approach to Language Pedagogy. White Plains, NY: Pearson Education, 2007.
- Van Allen, Roach. Language Experiences in Communication. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.
Arlene Marturano - Arlene Marturano, an educator, consultant, master gardener, and writer advocates gardens as a context and gardening as a tool for ...
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