Here's a link to an informative article from the Learning Disabilities Association of America about
the importance of "squiggles" in early writing awareness.
Taken from the above article:
The Texas Center for Reading and Language Arts provides the following Stages of Writing Development:
- Drawing
- Scribbling
- During the scribbling stage, children learn to distinguish writing from drawing
- Children try to reproduce letters and words through scribbles.
- Producing letter-like forms.
- Writing letter sequences or strings
- Spelling phonetically
- Spelling conventionally
And here :) is a picture of
my 3 year old daughter Mindel's writing:
She wrote this in her communication notebook from her new preschool. I was looking in it (looking for a message from her teacher– there was none, lol) while stopped at a traffic light. I turned around and said to her and her brother "Look at the nice writing Mindel did!" My son, who is five, said, "What does it say?" I responded, "I'm not sure. I don't know what she was writing." My daughter quickly chimed in, "I was writing Alef-beis." (Alef-beis is the Hebrew alphabet.)
My curiosity was piqued, so I then asked, "Mindel, did you write from this way to that way (indicating left to right) or that way to this way (indicating right to left). She motioned and said the former, left to right (as in English). Unlike English, Hebrew and Yiddish are both written from right to left. The language of instruction in her classroom is Yiddish, but she began learning the Hebrew letters in her nursery school last year. All of the books I read to her at home are, incidentally, in English. Clearly she is in the scribbling stage where she can distinguish writing from drawing, but cannot yet produce letter-like forms.
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