Week 7 discussion - Essay Example

Week 7-Discussion At the kindergarten level, children require attentive instruction from their teachers in order for them to develop early literacy skills such as reading and writing. The latter, proves more challenging for both kindergarten students and their teachers because it requires a student to demonstrate competence in phonemic awareness, presence of fine motor skills (using fingers to hold writing tools), and the ability to concentrate and generate ideas for writing. Therefore, teachers must recognize the writing skill level of each student in order to design activities that best suits their unique needs (Benson, 2004).

Moreover, the process of teaching writing skills to kindergarten students is not random or haphazard; instead, it entails a structured, systematic procedure. Development of phonemic awareness represents the first step; whereby, students learn about phonemes, which are the basic sound units and crucial to spelling and writing different words (learning of sound-symbol relationship). The second step entails teaching children how to hold writing materials, and how to space letters appropriately. The following advanced stages entail prompting the students to generate ideas mentally and represent them in short sentences that later add up to a paragraph.

For example, a teacher might ask students to talk about what and who constitute their family. During the earlier stages, teachers delegate limited autonomy to the students; however, in the advanced stages, they relinquish autonomy to the students (Mumford, 2009).Works CitedBenson, H. S. (2004, July). Emergent Writing. Retrieved from PBS Teachers: http://www.pbs.org/teachers/earlychildhood/articles/emergentwriting.htmlMumford, P. (2009, March 23). Teaching Writing in Kindergarten: A Structured Approach to Daily Writing That Helps Every Child Become a Confident, Capable Writer by Randee Bergen.

Retrieved from National Writing Project: http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2841