Pelletier – learning to print

So after children have been playing games at home and at school and in child care, such as finding things around the room that begin with the sound or the letter ‘s’, they start to become interested in creating something in print themselves because they are seeing print all around them. And most children have a curiosity about, they want to pick up a pencil and make a mark on a page. And with very little prompting from adults, they will begin to do this kind of thing. What I do in my research is I ask them to write certain things because I’m interested in what they think print is, and how they move from a pre-literate understanding of print to a literate understanding of print . 

So I might ask them to write ”Daddy has three hockey sticks”. That;’s one item from the test that I give them. “Daddy has three hockey sticks.” And I’m interested to know, are they going to represent “daddy” somehow. Are they going to represent the “three” somehow. Are they going to represent the hockey stick somehow. And how does that change as children begin to acquire the alphabetic principle. And sure enough, you see that they tend to draw a typical four-year-old representation of that would be some kind of form for “daddy”, it could be a “d’ or it could be a head, and the “three” might be represented both by the numeral and again by three objects.  

And as they acquire the alphabetic principle, they tend not to do this redundant writing anymore and they begin to use a “d” for “daddy”, maybe two “d’s”. They will start to include the “has” the word “has” which wasn’t important before but now it is. And they might represent the “three” by the numeral or they might try to write out the whole word. And then “hockey sticks” they will try to sound out as opposed to drawing three objects. So I’m very interested in how they make that journey and how interesting and clever their errors are.