Encourage writing in real life, authentic ways!

My daughter loves to write. One thing that we have done to encourage her writing is providing her authentic activities for writing. She doesn’t just write to practice writing; she writes for real world purposes and real audiences.

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Authentic Wrtiting

She writes in a variety of ways. She writes lists at Christmas time to share her Christmas lists with Santa and family members. She also writes other lists throughout the year. For example, we co-create lists for summer activities she wants to do and she writes lists of things she wants to take on trips. She often writes notes to her friends to thank them for their friendship or to tell them that she is thinking about them. She writes in her journal and even though her journal entries started out as strings of letters, she was so proud of her writing. Writing is something she sees us do and she wants to do it to.

One way we have encouraged her writing is from a very young age, we have asked her to write as much as she can on her Valentine’s cards and thank you notes for gifts she has received. Motivated by her appreciation for gifts and her friends, she excitedly writes as much as she can.

Over the years, as she has written her Valentine’s cards, there has been a natural progression as to how much she is able to do. The first year, when she wrote her name it looked more like large swirls or scribbles, the next year she was able to write a few letters in her name, the next year she was able to write her name, and eventually her friends names. When we ask her to write her friends’ names, we often provide her with a list so that she can accurately write their name on each card. One time, we used her magnetic letters to spell their names so she could write them on their cards. This year, we were able to orally spell the names she couldn’t automatically remember. Throughout this process, we provide her with scaffolds, or supports, but only as much as she needs. I am a big proponent of supporting without doing too much of the work. You can read more about that in this post here. If you are a teacher or want to read more about supporting students in a traditional classroom setting, I recommend reading Who’s Doing the Work by Burkins and Yaris and Mindsets and Moves by Gravity Goldberg.

Thank You cards

For my daughter’s thank you cards, we have taken advantage of one of the many card companies such as Shutterfly to support her writing. When she was younger, we had the thank you message printed in the card and left room for her to sign her name. Her cards looked something like this

Thank you for coming to my birthday party! I love my gift!

Love,

We have also used thank you cards that have fill in the blanks. Like these Christmas Thank You Cards shown here:

As she has gotten older, we have given her more autonomy. This year, I took one of her cards and wrote out a template she could copy. It looked like this:

I also provided a list of her friends names so she would be able to spell and write those correctly. I sat with her while she was writing the cards and helped her when she needed some assistance or lost her place.

Encouraging Motivation

She was so excited to be able to write her thank you notes this year and she took pride in being able to do more of the writing. Since she just turned six, this is a longer process for her and requires a great deal of concentration so we divided the gift list and wrote a few each day over a span of several days. We quit writing before she got too tired or frustrated and before her writing became less legible. She was so proud of herself as we mailed each thank you note out to her friends and family.

Writing thank you notes like this gave her practice with the format of a letter and the format of addressing an envelope. It also helped with practicing her high-frequency words and writing some of her letters that she has had some difficulty with (like the direction of b versus the direction of d).