Writing 3 to 7

The teaching of writing requires an understanding of all the characteristics and needs of a writer at work, and an understanding of the multiple demands that adults make on children when we ask them to write. Teachers should provide the supports and the direct teaching necessary to bring children, without undue haste and without creating undue anxiety, to an understanding of the conventions of the writing system appropriate for their age, and to a relaxed control of the physical act of handwriting. Speech emerged hundreds of thousands of years before writing was invented. The first civilisation to invent writing, in about 3500 bc, was Sumer, in the southern part of what is now Iraq. A teacher who teaches that spelling patterns are always or nearly always regular in English words, and that this regularity is always or nearly always a function of symbol-to-sound correspondences, is misleading the children.