Interviewing Children on Writing Development

Adults tend to separate writing and drawing into two categories. The children I interviewed ranged in age from three to seven, and their responses varied when they were asked what a writer does. Some replied that writers write letters and numbers, or stories and poems, while yet others said they write pictures and rainbows. When young children first pick up a writing utensil, they usually begin to scribble. Gradually, form begins to take shape as the child sees that s/he can control the crayon/pencil. According to the website Stages of Writing based on Richard Gentry’s work, the stages of writing usually progress from scribbling to letter-like symbols, then strings of letters before beginning sounds emerge, followed by consonants representing words, then initial, middle and final sounds, transitional phases and standard spelling (retrieved April 18, 2006). As one seven year old I interviewed succinctly put it, her writing followed these stages: “When I was one I scribbled. When I was two, I drew faces. When I was three and four, I did pretend writing. When I was five, I wrote two or three letter words. When I was six, I began to write sentences, and now that I’m seven, I write long stories.”