The ability to write well comes gradually and in stages. This skill is a synthesis of many writing skills, each building on one another. Here is what I see in practice and what the Common Core State Standards recommends for kindergarten and first graders.
In kindergarten children learn to write letters and words, and some advanced students may write sentences. They might write with phonetic or invented spelling, backward letters, missing punctuation and haphazard capitalization. They use a combination of upper case and lower case letters. They like to draw a picture of what they are describing.
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The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) ask kindergarteners to “use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose opinion pieces in which they tell a reader the topic or the name of the book they are writing about and state an opinion or preference about the topic or book; use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose informative/explanatory texts in which they name what they are writing about and supply some information about the topic; and use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to narrate a single event or several loosely linked events, tell about the events in the order in which they occurred, and provide a reaction to what happened.”
In first grade children’s writing ability varies widely, but teachers expect students to write in sentences by the end of the year. They might draw a picture at the top of a paper and then write one or more sentences under the picture telling what the picture means, and using many of the errors which kindergarteners use. Many of the rules of writing and spelling are fluid for a first grader, but they are becoming formal than for kindergarteners.
- The Common Core State Standards recommend that first graders “write opinion pieces in which they introduce the topic or name the book they are writing about, state an opinion, supply a reason for the opinion, and provide some sense of closure; write informative/explanatory texts in which they name a topic, supply some facts about the topic, and provide some sense of closure; and write narratives in which they recount two or more appropriately sequenced events, include some details regarding what happened, use temporal words to signal event order, and provide some sense of closure.”
As you can see, a wide gap exists between what many children can do and what the CCSS expect them to do. For more on the Common Core State Standards, go to http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/K/.
English Writing Teacher 