Webinar Transcript

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Erin Bailey: Welcome, everyone! Thanks for coming. We're going to give you a minute to trickle in.

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Erin Bailey: If you've joined us before, welcome back!

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Erin Bailey: And if this is your first session, we're especially glad that you're here today. This is a webinar focused on at-home writing strategies for early childhood. That's…

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Erin Bailey: Our toddlers all the way up to age 5ish, but certainly all of these strategies can be used for children of any age.

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Erin Bailey: Closed captioning will be available. We encourage you to use the chat box. If you want to put questions, use the Q&A box. We'll have time to get to those at the end.

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Erin Bailey: And so today we're focusing on writing. This is our family-facing webinar, so welcome, families. If you are an educator who is joining us to get some tips to share with the families in your school community, you're welcome as well. We hope that everyone learns a lot from us today.

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Erin Bailey: Just a little bit about who we are. I'm Dr. Erin Bailey, I'm the Vice President of Literacy Programs and Research at Reading is Fundamental, and we are the nation's largest children's literacy nonprofit. Our mission is simple, to inspire the joy of reading and ensure that every child has

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Erin Bailey: access to opportunities and resources to become a lifelong reader and a lifelong learner. These webinars are part of our ongoing commitment to every educator, every family member who wants to support literacy and bring those strategies to life.

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Erin Bailey: And I am thrilled to have Dr. Crystal Luce from Westchester University in Pennsylvania join us this evening.

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Erin Bailey: Crystal has over 17 years as a teacher, reading specialist, instructional coach, administrator, before she went into being a professor. Her research focuses on early learning environments.

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Erin Bailey: teacher preparation and professional learning, and she also is the founder of the nonprofit Plant the Seed of Learning, and she also has a podcast around this topic as well. So she works directly with families and young children to support early learning through something I'm very passionate about, play-based learning experiences.

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Erin Bailey: And she shares all that wealth of knowledge through her podcast as well. So we're excited to have you here. Welcome, Dr. Luce.

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Crystal Loose: Thank you so much, Erin! I'm very excited to be here tonight, to discuss all things writing, so let's get started!

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Crystal Loose: And thank you for the lovely introduction. That was very nice.

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Crystal Loose: Welcome to, Goals for Early Writing at Home. So, we'll talk about several things today, but especially why writing is crucial for toddlers and preschoolers, and then we'll discuss a little bit about what the research says about this topic, how this can be accomplished at home in fun and entertaining ways, and early writing strategies.

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Crystal Loose: So, let's begin with one of the foundational elements of writing, oral language development.

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Crystal Loose: This is the beginning blocks of expression, especially necessary when you're beginning to develop those writing skills. Oral language precedes literacy, and then it parallels it as children progress in the literacy spectrum. Oral and written language are developmental processes that are mutually supportive of one another.

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Crystal Loose: And parents are essential in building oral language.

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Crystal Loose: The quality of the language that parents use at home, the books that are read aloud to children, they all are the building blocks of the oral language development, so essential for literacy and early writing.

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Crystal Loose: So, let's move on a little bit and dig into this.

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Crystal Loose: So, when you're thinking about oral language development, we think about it as foundational for writing development early on.

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Crystal Loose: So, it is strongly predictive of later reading and writing abilities. That's why it's so important that parents begin talking with their children right from birth.

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Crystal Loose: This builds the oral language vocabulary so important and crucial later. In preschool, receptive language generally develops before expressive language, so I thought it would be essential that we

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Crystal Loose: talk a little bit about what these words mean. Receptive language and expressive language. Receptive language is how we understand the language around us, and the ability to hear and

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Crystal Loose: comprehend language. It's needed for learning, play, communication with others, understanding direction, safety, and participation in everyday activities. So, if you look at the chart, receptive language.

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Crystal Loose: could be following directions, such as when a parent says, get your shoes on. This takes a lot of skill, but this is actually the beginning of oral language development. So if they're not listening to you, they might be still developing that skill.

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Crystal Loose: They're beginning to understand questions and the knowledge to answer questions, because there's a difference between statements, such as, get your shoes on, and questioning that parents do.

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Crystal Loose: They begin to identify objects such as colors, so find the blue block, and then they're starting to grasp higher-level concepts.

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Crystal Loose: Expressive language is when we're communicating with others. So, expressive language is really expressed through speech, sign language, written words, which is what we're talking about today, pictures, which we'll talk about as well, symbols and gestures, and even body language.

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Crystal Loose: When babies are first born, they're looking at a

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Crystal Loose: caregivers face, and this is crucial in the development of understanding body language, which comes later through expressive language. So, the way babies stare at you initially is so, so crucial for the development of expressive language to be used later. Expressive language is when you're using words or sentences to communicate

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Crystal Loose: When we're talking about our smallest children, it's when we're using smiles, babbles, and then as we progress into toddlerhood, phrases, and then preschoolers start to use sentences.

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Crystal Loose: The second area essential for writing development is vocabulary development. So, let's talk a little bit about those building blocks for writing development, reading books, and this is actually at a session that, I taught in Pennsylvania with families, and you can see here, we get down on the floor, and, after I do this session, we actually apply what was talked about. And so.

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Crystal Loose: This is a mother and her daughter, and they're actually reading the book together.

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Crystal Loose: The second step of this is examining pictures. This is huge for vocabulary development, especially when you're pointing to the pictures in the book, and telling them what the picture is, and then having them find the picture later. This is great.

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Crystal Loose: for developing vocabulary, and the third area crucial for vocabulary development is singing songs. Singing songs are a great way for children to understand the language structure, and eventually they begin singing the songs themselves, and it's just a great way to develop vocabulary.

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Crystal Loose: All of this is essential and leads to writing, because as writers, you're using your oral language skills to put writing on paper, you're using your vocabulary development to think about what you want to say through writing.

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Crystal Loose: And then you're using your fine motor skills. This is the third area essential for development of writing. Fine motor skills are so important. You can see this is at another session that I've taught, children,

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Crystal Loose: very young, beginning to write, using, special crayons. This is all the beginning phases of fine motor development.

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Crystal Loose: So, fine motor development really begins when babies

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Crystal Loose: and toddlers start to play. So it doesn't mean you need a writing instrument, it means you're strengthening those small hand and finger muscles, leading to drawing.

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Crystal Loose: So, I like to give some milestones, between 12 to 18 months, you'll see babies building with blocks, maybe scribbling, waving bye-bye, and using a spoon. Those are essential milestones in fine motor development.

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Crystal Loose: 18 to 24 months of age increases with the block building. You start to see some towers, you might see some rings being put on stackers.

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Crystal Loose: you might see the pincher grips starting to happen. At 2 to 3 years of age, you'll see some large towers happening, you might be able to see them unscrew a lid on a toy jar, copying a circle.

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Crystal Loose: Being able to zipper things, but by kindergarten, most students should be able to use the tripod pencil grip with a pencil.

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Crystal Loose: They should be able to use scissors to cut lines, and have mostly,

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Crystal Loose: Something that looks like, a letter when they're writing, or a shape.

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Crystal Loose: So, a couple things that I like to show parents pertaining to this early development, when I talk about some of those toys, these are great for fine motor development, the simply stringing those beads like this, and then forming the little bracelets. For babies, you might see little objects or puzzles like this that pull apart, or…

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Crystal Loose: come apart easily, and then you put them back together. They're all essential for fine motor development. Something else that I like are these crayons that are in the shape of triangles, because it naturally helps them

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Crystal Loose: grip the crown in the way that we want them to eventually grip, and that's with that tripod grip.

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Crystal Loose: So, what about the preschool-aged students? They, too, are starting to develop, fine motor skills essential for writing. You might see them being able to, play with Play-Doh and actually start to make shapes.

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Crystal Loose: Screwing nuts and bolts, also essential. Squeezing a tennis ball, some arts and craft activities that I like for preschoolers.

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Crystal Loose: Involves a golf tee, and they use it to poke holes in a paper to make a drawing. That really helps with the grip.

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Crystal Loose: Simple activities at home include peeling fruit. So, peeling an orange is actually progressing in fine motor development.

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Crystal Loose: Squeezing anything, sponges, or I like these squeezy bottles like this, I fill them up, and I give children a bin, and they squeeze these, and that's actually helping with their grip.

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Crystal Loose: a great way to encourage fine motor development. The fuzzy pipe cleaner is also excellent for preschoolers, helps with fine motor development, also great, to talk about shapes, which actually helps with writing when they're doing their pictures.

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Crystal Loose: So, the more hands-on materials and tools you use, the more beneficial it is for our youngest learners, because it keeps them engaged. You're developing those fine motor skills while you're playing, and they don't even realize it.

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Crystal Loose: Whoops, I think I went a little too far there.

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Crystal Loose: So, let's talk a little bit about the research. So, now we talked about 3 crucial areas for, writing development. We've talked about oral language, we've talked about vocabulary, and fine motor skills. So those are the three building blocks that lead

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Crystal Loose: To fine motor development and writing skills.

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Crystal Loose: Let's start with handwriting. Handwriting, I say, is tattoo-worthy. So, a lot of people put tattoos on, their bodies because they feel this is something really important. I say handwriting is just as important as any tattoo. It's tattoo-worthy.

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Crystal Loose: There's a lot of research out right now

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Crystal Loose: Regarding handwriting. For a little while, it went by the wayside, because we were so involved in technology.

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Crystal Loose: Handwriting difficulties, they've discovered, can affect children's attitude and motivation at school, and sometimes they begin because children come to school lacking the fine motor development necessary for writing, so they get a little bit discouraged.

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Crystal Loose: During the preschool years, it's really important to develop handwriting. It helps with literacy skills and children's overall development.

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Crystal Loose: It leads from the progression, from scribbling to the actual written language. Handwriting is a critical indicator of students' academic success in kindergarten. So that's, too, why you want to practice writing at home, even if it's with these chunky crowns. So important.

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Crystal Loose: Strong motor… strong fine motor skills in kindergarten are predictive of reading achievement. Children who develop fine… better fine motor skills showed improvement not only in literacy, but in mathematical performance. So, veryimportant.

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Crystal Loose: So, I often get asked at sessions, okay, well, what's the difference if, my child does poking at the keyboard? Isn't that developing the fine motor skills necessary? And I say, no, not really. It's not the same. And here's why. Although, using your fingers is really great, and it does do something for fine motor.

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Crystal Loose: Handwriting practice has been identified as a key exercise supporting the acquisition of alphabetic knowledge.

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Crystal Loose: And this supports the pre-reading stage. So, knowing letters and practicing the formation of letters

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Crystal Loose: does something for the brain. And what is especially important is not only

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Crystal Loose: knowing the letters, but practicing them through writing, that really, really helps and plays a critical role in embedding the alphabetic knowledge within the brain's learning center. So, that's why it's important that children are practicingwriting at home.

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Crystal Loose: The shift from handwriting to typing may actually negatively affect the literacy learning.

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Crystal Loose: So,

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Crystal Loose: when you have your youngest learners, don't stress about the writing of the letters. Remember, you're developing the fine motor skills, but maybe the year before kindergarten, when they're really starting to get interested in writing their names, that's when it's really important to practice those handwriting skills.

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Crystal Loose: So, there is a progression of writing. After you've developed all these background skills.

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Crystal Loose: Writing goes through a simple progression, and sometimes parents don't think children are writing, but they're really writing.

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Crystal Loose: So, we begin with emergent writing. Emergent writing is a child's first attempt at writing.

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Crystal Loose: It begins as young as 2, and they simply start to imitate the print around them, and so they'll scribble. And this is actually my daughter's writing. I took a picture of it. So I always love to look at these things. It brings back great memories, but really, this is marked to represent their thinking. She was actually doing a picture there.

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Crystal Loose: So this is emerging very early. That's why it's called emergent.

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Crystal Loose: Stage one is the first stage of writing, and this is the random scribbling stage between 15 and two and a half years, 15 months and two and a half years. At this stage.

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Crystal Loose: Many children love the sensory feedback that art activities provide. So it might be the smell of paint, the way the crayon feels in their hand, the squishiness of Play-Doh.

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Crystal Loose: Ugh, I thought I was gonna sneeze.

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Crystal Loose: Okay. Some children do not enjoy some of this sensory.

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Crystal Loose: activity, play. And that's okay. Sometimes they hate fingerprint painting, they don't like to get their fingers dirty. As they grow and begin to tolerate more types of sensory input, gradually reintroduce sensory art at later stages.

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Crystal Loose: This offers great opportunity for scribbling, and it's important that you offer a wide variety of art materials. So, yogurt or applesauce can serve as finger paint. You don't have to go out and buy finger paint. The chunky crayons that I showed earlier, sidewalk chalk.

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Crystal Loose: Large paintbrushes are great, especially for outside play.

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Crystal Loose: I love when children paint the walk with… with paintbrushes, and essentially, they're trying to, write, so…

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Crystal Loose: It's a great method for scribbling.

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Crystal Loose: Stage 2 is when you see controlled scribbling, and this happens between 2 and 3 years.

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Crystal Loose: Over time, children make the transition to holding the crayon between their thumb and pointer finger, and you might see marks that are more controlled, like this. So before it was a giant scribble, but now they're actually more controlled.

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Crystal Loose: And you might see, diagonal, as you see here, or vertical or horizontal lines.

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Crystal Loose: As children progress, you'll see lines and patterns. So, I love this chart on the left. It talks about all the pre-writing line developments for kids. So, you can see the vertical line happens early, then the horizontal line, and then progressing to the circle. This is actually harder for children to do.

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Crystal Loose: the crossing?

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Crystal Loose: of the vertical line actually happens much later, because it is very hard to make that shape, progressing to square, to diagonals, the X around H5, and the triangle shape around H5.

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Crystal Loose: And then you'll see, at this stage, children begin to understand that print is made up of curved.

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Crystal Loose: Straight and diagonal lines.

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Crystal Loose: They may not yet be able to make letters correctly, but they begin to make marks resembling common letters, sometimes using dots, curves, and lines.

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Crystal Loose: So, your toddler is beginning to realize that print conveys meaning, and may read to you what they have written on a page. By age 5, most children have developed the ability to make all lines necessary for letter formation, as you see here, and as you see on this page, the writing starts to go from left to right.

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Crystal Loose: That's a really exciting development, and we talked earlier about the importance of reading a book.

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Crystal Loose: Children are reading, and you're pointing, if you're showing them left to right, this is how they begin to develop the understanding that print goes from left to right.

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Crystal Loose: So it begins by all those things you've done previously.

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Crystal Loose: Stage 4 includes pictures of objects and people. It's between 3 to 5 years of age. Young children will often create a picture first, and then label their masterpiece afterwards. During this stage, you'll see your child more clearly planning a picture, and then adding more details to the picture, using more controlled movements of pencils or crayons. You might see more

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Crystal Loose: colors. Children's pictures are often built from circles, so you can see this is very typical of Stage 4. You'll see a circle for the person's head, and then you'll see arms and legs just randomly sticking out.

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Crystal Loose: This is an exciting phase. You can see now that children understand that a drawing on a page represents something to them. Could be a dog, it could be a cat, it could be the sun, but it is symbolizing a real object.

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Crystal Loose: At stage 5, you'll see letter and word practice, and this is between 3 and 5 years of age.

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Crystal Loose: Children usually begin making pretend letters. You can see lots of amazing letters on this paper, and then using all the strokes they have mastered. So you can see a lot going on here.

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Crystal Loose: They'll assume that they've created letters that are real, because they resemble letters that they've seen. So, all the amazing reading that you've been doing will pay off, and they'll start to mimic that.

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Crystal Loose: Their word scribbles will begin to change from one long string of letters

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Crystal Loose: Two actual shapes grouped together, and they start to form something that looks like words.

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Crystal Loose: And this is a true milestone when you see this happening.

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Crystal Loose: Something else to think about is art. Art and writing are one and the same for young children.

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Crystal Loose: You'll see them doing a lot of art early on, and this is really important because they're discovering that their mark on the page was directly caused by their hand movements. This starts early and is powerful, because they're starting to learn about cause and effect.

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Crystal Loose: This development in their thinking skills is further fueled by increased muscle control in their hands and fingers. So all that work you did on fine motor development begins with art and then leads to the writing, and you'll see the progression that we discussed on the previous slides start to happen.

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Crystal Loose: At this stage, many children love the sensory activities, and that's important that they understand that art is necessary, that it's part of writing and creating masterpieces.

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Crystal Loose: So, some progressions that you'll see.

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Crystal Loose: As far as fine motor development, and occupational therapists love to talk about these skill sets, because

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Crystal Loose: The development of the muscles is so crucial for writing. It begins with your hand and finger strength. You'll see that early on, even with babies, when they're learning to hold things in their hands. Crossing the midline, so important. Your body is the mid, and so being able to cross over.

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Crystal Loose: The hand-eye coordination, being able to grasp, is really developing some fine motor strengths. The pencil graphs happens. Hand-eye coordination is really essential, so all the playing with toys actually leads to better hand-eye coordination.

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Crystal Loose: Tummy time with babies, so important for hand-eye coordination and developing the core strength necessary, which is essential for writing. Bilateral integration.

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Crystal Loose: involves the upper body strength. The upper body strength, also so crucial. When you think about a child when they're just starting to sit and write and scribble, they really need that upper body strength.

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Crystal Loose: object manipulation begins to happen. You see that, through Play-Doh activity, and when they're manipulating that Play-Doh, you know that they're strengthening their fine motor skills. Visual perception, so important to, enable them to write, print.

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Crystal Loose: Alphabetically, you'll begin to see the development of hand dominance, so they'll start to favor one hand or the other, and that is all important.

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Crystal Loose: Something I also like to tell parents, pictures are wonderful ways

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Crystal Loose: to give children ideas for writing. It helps to develop imagination, it helps with their storytelling ability. I'm a previous kindergarten teacher, and one thing that started to happen with my kindergarten students is they were running out of ideas to write. It's… I couldn't believe it. So I used to give them folders filled with pictures.

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Crystal Loose: And every day, they would come in, and they would pull out a beautiful picture, and it would get them started with a story, and then they would always add their own

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Crystal Loose: Additional writing to it.

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Crystal Loose: So, when you're at home, you can practice this skill set just with a picture. You can pull out family photos and have them start to talk about what the picture means, what happened, what happened first, what happened next, and what happened last, and that really helps build vocabulary and also the understanding of writing.

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Crystal Loose: Is telling a story.

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Crystal Loose: And it helps them understand progression from beginning to end. Because when you're writing a story, typically you want a beginning and end. And that happens much later.

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Crystal Loose: when they're entering formal schooling, but you need to develop that when they're young through pictures. The pictures on the right here can be found on the RIF website. This is a great set of cards to help build that vocabulary, so essential that we talked about earlier.

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Crystal Loose: literacy-rich environments of any kind are really important. I love to tell parents at my sessions to

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Crystal Loose: Have some type of bag that they travel with when they're out and about, because it's a great way to avoid tantrums, when you can pull out your goodie bag, and you have a lot of toys for fine motor skill development, you have a notebook, you have papers, you have markers, you have stickers,

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Crystal Loose: You have robots, whatever they're into. This is an example of my daughter's little writing book. So this came with us everywhere, and inside it, she would draw all kinds of fun pictures, she would take notes when we were out and about.

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Crystal Loose: So, I love to suggest that to parents.

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Crystal Loose: So, just a final note about reading and writing, and how interdependent they are.

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Crystal Loose: They're essential to each other and mutually beneficial. Beginning readers and writers need to learn to use many sources of information, including memory, experience, pictures, and their knowledge of language, the sound-symbol connections, and phonics, so important and crucial for later

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Crystal Loose: writing skill development. So all of the wonderful reading that you're doing, all the scribbling that you're starting out with, all lead to wonderful masterpieces.

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Crystal Loose: So, I hope this was helpful. Here's a little information about, the Early Childhood Education Center. I don't know if you want to elaborate at all on that, Erin?

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Erin Bailey: Yeah, thank you so much, Dr.

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Crystal Loose: Really stop.

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Erin Bailey: That was just lovely. I love all the practical tips for the families, too, and

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Erin Bailey: I really appreciate the way you walked us through how writing actually begins with expressive, and recept… you know, listening and speaking, basically, expressive and receptive language.

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Erin Bailey: You know, I have a one-year-old.

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Erin Bailey: And he's just starting to, if I say, go get your shoes, go and get your shoes, who would have known that that is actually skills for helping build his writing journey for him, you know? So thank you so much. I did drop a few things in the chat for everyone. All of these resources can be found on Reading as Fundamentals Early Childhood Education, Digital Hub, Digital Center, which is here.

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Erin Bailey: And yeah, we'll, leave some time for Q&A if anyone has any questions.

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Erin Bailey: I did have one, while we're… if anyone wants to put them in the chat or in the Q&A box, go ahead. You know, I… I appreciate what you said about how handwriting is so important, and we kind of went into typing for a while.

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Erin Bailey: I was wondering, because I've seen this come up a lot now, if you have any thoughts on cursive writing. I know that's for older children, usually, but it seems like when Common Core kind of took over around 2013, that phased out cursive and almost replaced it with typing a little bit, so just curious if you have any thoughts there.

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Crystal Loose: I am 100% for cursive, and the same research goes direct… it really, explains cursive writing as well. So, what the research is showing is when children are note-taking, so they're… they can print, but, writing out the notes.

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Crystal Loose: is so much better for memory retention. So, what's happening, at least in Pennsylvania, a lot of schools are required to teach cursive again, which I'm so thankful for. But when you think about note-taking skills, cursive is faster.

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Crystal Loose: And so, that's why they're bringing it back for those reasons. It's better for brain development, brain retention.

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Crystal Loose: So yeah, I am 100% for cursive.

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Erin Bailey: It makes a lot of sense, especially if you think about, phonics development, too. A lot of the training that I've had is all about multi-sensory learning. So, for example, air writing. You're not just seeing the letter and saying the sound, but you'reactually drawing… I'm drawing an A right now, and I'm saying.

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Erin Bailey: As I'm drawing it, and as you mentioned, you can do this also with Play-Doh,

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Erin Bailey: GUI stuff, you know, just things depending on where you are with your sensory, you know, your approach to sensory.

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Erin Bailey: But I think it makes sense because you're making that connection between the shape and the sound while you're doing it, versus just typing, touching it on a keyboard. It doesn't seem like it's gonna make that concrete connection there.

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Crystal Loose: So true. And it follows children all the way up through high school into college. The research is really amazing about the importance of writing the notes and the cursive.

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Crystal Loose: So, yeah.

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Erin Bailey: Many people, if you want to remember something, write it down.

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Crystal Loose: Exactly! That's why we have thousands of sticky notes everywhere. Like, don't forget to do this. Yeah.

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Erin Bailey: Well, thank you.

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Erin Bailey: Thank you so much again. If you are interested in catching more of our webinars, we have one coming up this Friday, 12 o'clock Eastern Time, and that is Every Book is a Mental Health Book. We'll have our wonderful facilitator, Jessica Jones, will walk you through how to use children's literature to promote mental health for young children. And then on May 12th, we will kick off summer with Finding Joy in Summer

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Erin Bailey: reading, brought to you by Katie Potter from Lee & Lowe Publishing, and our very own Carly O'Brien from Reading is Fundamental. And don't forget to check out our podcast, Reading Inspires, hosted by myself, Dr. Erin Bailey, and I will be having Crystal on the show in the coming months, so please be sure to tune in for that.

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Erin Bailey: And thank you for coming, we hope you have a wonderful evening.

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Crystal Loose: Thank you! And I'm looking forward to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me.

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Erin Bailey: Wonderful. Thanks, everyone. Have a good evening.