At La Cosecha 2014 I attended a session by Freeman and Freeman.  Loved it! Here is a copy of their handout that I downloaded from the conference website: Writing handout- Freeman.

The presentation was a summary of part of the text, Teaching Reading and Writing in Spanish and English which is also available in Spanish.  Looking at the writing children do while knowing the stages teachers can admire the amazing work that students do while coaching them on to the next level.

A few highlights:

• Drawing is the starting of writing;
• Student scribbles mirror the environmental print they see around themselves;
• As very beginning writers, students may use the letters in their name, perhaps the only letters they know at first, to represent all letters;
• In English students learn consonant sounds first- in Spanish they learn vowels;
• As students work out consistency they may spell the same word in many different ways in the same sentence or paragraph;
• All students can be accepted where they are and coached to higher stages.

As a teacher, I love coaching writers because it involves all four modalities of language- speaking, listening, reading and writing.  Students tell their story (or information), they write it, they read it back while listening to their work.  Then they revise.