Entry #7 Open Entry: Stage 1 of Spelling Development

 After having read this week's reading and letting it sit around in my head for a little while, one topic sticks out because it's something that I never have really would have considered to be part of spelling development, emergent spelling. It's not that I didn't consider that emergent spelling was a stage but at when the stage began was something of an "oh yeah" moment. In Tompkins, she points out that it starts by "string scribbles, letters, and letterlike forms together (Tompkins, 2017 p. 167)." I never really connected that when a child is scribbling "making words" on a paper at a young age that it was the beginning of their learning to spell. I always felt that it was fun and play, but as I talked about in my previous post that for the young learners, play is learning. That this idea of writing is were kids begin to convey meaning about something else through writing, they are attempting to spell words. I had never connect the two in my mind and never associated the two. Now here I am talking about play learning two post in a row.

I would love to say that this new learning has had some profound shift in my thinking about teaching, particularly in teaching phonics. However, I have been coming into all this new learning with an open mind. It would have been a disservice to myself to come in thinking I knew what was going to work best and not wanting to grow. 

 

I am now seeing that there connections that I would have never even imagined. The biggest one is how much learning is done before I even knew it. I knew that reading to your child is very important, which is why my wife and I read to and with our children as soon as we got them home and still do. But, you never think about how much of their play and scribbling was tied to their early learning, something I never made a connections with. The play where they were labeling things with their scribbles when they play store, and draw pictures. This was something that I never even thought was their beginning to learn and make sense of the world around them. I find this fact interesting, that what most people see as play, is learning to our youngest age group. That children are not only playing and mimicking what they see everyday but that they are also doing it in their scribbling and drawings.