Learning to See Progress

We need to have more confidence in our kids.

"Just as children move from babbling and incorrect pronunciation when learning to talk, children move rapidly from the invented spelling to correct or conventional spelling." Rasinski and Padak explain this process in their article, Teaching Phonemic Awareness. As I read this, I was surprised that what seems obvious now seems so profound. Children's development will progress. It's what children do. In Raskinski and Padak's article, as well as in Every Mark on the Page by Cusumano, it becomes clear that if we give students the opportunity to explore their developing skills and experiment with techniques they will show great progress. No need to freak out.

I understand though, why parents or in my case, novice teacher might be nervous about a student's writing and speaking skills developing properly. Those are critical life skills. Cusumano does a wonderful job explaining how to find the progress in young students' writing. The first thing I found important to keep in mind was that children are not born knowing that spaces go between words and that the same letters can be combined in different ways to make different words. Those are huge milestones that we often overlook because we're too busy correcting spelling or worrying that the student's d's are still backwards. Cusumano explains that recognizing a child's independent willingness to attempt spelling the words they want to use is a skill that will serve them well throughout their early writing process, that even if most of the words are spelled incorrectly, the real success is in the student's desire to try, to experiment. Cusumano explains "The learning can progress rapidly if the child discovers and tests out the rules themselves instead of having them imposed without."

This philosophy is echoed in Rasinski and Padak's Teaching Phonemic Awareness. They say "Most children develop phonemic awareness naturally through everyday play with language sounds..." By giving children the opportunity to play with language, they can develop the skills we want them to independently. Both articles make the point that this type of development leads to stronger mastery of the skills. Children are not just told what to do, but discover that by using correct pronunciation or spelling their messages are conveyed more effectively to others. In fact, the two are connected. Rasinski and Padak say "Literacy scholars argue that writing in which students use their knowledge of sound-symbol correspondence, also known as invented or phonemic spelling, is a powerful way to help students develop their phonemic awareness as well as their basic phonics knowledge." So, in fact, the two skills are linked and can be practiced simultaneously by children.

I am sympathetic to parents who worry about their children's speaking and writing development, as a new teacher I know I will want my students to be hitting their benchmarks right on schedule. These articles remind us though, that more important than the schedule we've made for the students is the students' ability to explore their developing skills themselves.