March 6

The article that we read for this week was very interesting and at times, a bit frustrating.  A lot of this reading was about looking at a kindergartener's way of writing.  The teacher of this student would identify this way of writing as "immature prewriting" or "off-task behavior".  This was a bit discouraging to me, because the student is so young and was (whoever the student was in the situation) making an attempt at either drawing, or writing his/her name, and even though it wasn't always 100% accurate was still making a valid attempt.  Phonetically speaking, the attempts made (one student tried to write her name and another tried to write "happy birthday") were reasonable and in my opinion shouldn't be considered "off-task" at all, but simply encouraged by maybe saying, "You've got the sounds right!  What's another way you think you could spell that?"