Learning to read and write "every mark on the page"

I found the Cusumano article entitled "Every Mark on the Page: Educating Family and Community Members about Young Children's Writing" to be beguiling and informative. Because my extended family is close, my parents and I visited my 7-year-old cousin's school last spring for a program that showcased the work that the kids had done over the year. Among the pieces on display were writing samples. Although I didn't vocalize it, I must admit that I also began to subconsciously critique her work in the same manner that many of the parents that Cusumano describes: I looked at the grammatical conventions rather than focusing on the content and the ideas from which the stories were comprised. Like many of the parents, I think my assessment involved ignorance, simply because I didn't really stop to consider that at this stage in her writing career it truly is more important that she be able to express her thoughts than be able to express them correctly. Thus, I believe that it will be imperative for me, as a teacher, to effectively communicate with the parents of my students so that they are aware of what I am looking for in their child's work and where I believe their student should be. Moreover, I like the approach that Cusumano took by strategically showing parents the works of students who were a grade level below and above in order to visually suggest where their children are coming from, at now, and going to be developmentally.


Although I am aware that the content of writing is important, I also know that grammar is too. As children hone their critical thinking skill and learn to write them down, they should also be learning to construct effective sentences. Throughout reading the Cusumano article in addition to the assigned chapters of Sound Systems, I found myself wondering what the best approach would be for pointing out the mistakes found in students' writing. Coming up with mini-lessons was one suggestion that Cusumano gave, and it seemed that she looked down upon simply identifying them for the students to correct; however, I would how effective peer-editing would be. It seems that not only would students be able to test their own grammatical knowledge, but they would also be given the chance to hone their reading skills. Also, would identifying spelling mistakes by merely circling the misspelled words and then having the student look up the correct spelling in the dictionary be an effective approach? I am interested to know what others think about these ideas.

It is no secret that reading and writing are invariably linked together. I really liked the suggestion of utilizing a "print-rich classroom" found in chapter 6 of Sound Systems. In this section of the text, the authors proposed picking a sound (e.g. long "a" vowel sound) and having the students "read the classroom" to discover words from displayed writing samples that the children had composed, bulletin boards, or other posters within the class. The identified words would then be listed on the board so that they could be sorted according to the letters that were involved in making the sounds. What a great technique for interactive and collaborative learning, granted that the words from the children's samples were spelled correctly!

Overall, I found these readings to be inspiring by providing me with many useful tools that I could potentially use as a future language arts teacher!