Early Writing

By: Fatin Najiha bt Zainuddin

Fathul Jannah bt Abd Hamid

Abdul Hafiz bin Alam

Foo Pei Jing

1. General guidelines

• Much time at the early stages of writing programme will be utilized for pre-communicative activities through which pupils learn the mechanics and conventions necessary for effective communicative writing.

• These includes handwriting, spelling, punctuation and paragraphing. At this stage the students’ knowledge about the other aspect of the English, such as grammar, vocabulary, sentence construction is increased as a result of input during listening and reading.

The following is the list of things that are very important in early writing instruction:

1. Provide meaningful contexts for learning the mechanics of writing. For example, if children are made to see that good handwriting and spelling are courtesies to the reader, they are more likely to be interested in paying attention to maintaining the proper balance between words.

2. Use pupils own oral compositions for giving them insights into writing. Children can compose or can be taught to compose long before they have the handwriting and spelling skills necessary to write down what they want to say. Be their scribes. Write down brief stories, news items that pupils dictate to you exactly as they say it.

3. Constantly keep the benefits of learning to write before them. For example, if you give long lists of things for the pupils to bring, point out how useful writing down the list would be in helping them to remember what to bring. Get students to write captions for their drawings.

• 4. Make it a practice to read to our pupils a variety of genre. Discuss with them what they like about the stories. Include discussion of the writers’ styles, choice of words, etc., which is appropriate.

• These reading will serve as models for the pupils when they themselves start writing. This internalisations of story grammars, style, etc., is a long process and the pupils need many experiences with a genre before they can internalize its stylistics features, conventions, etc.

5. Develop your pupils’ natural curiosity and thinking skills. Without these, they will have nothing to say, even if they have the means in term of language, handwriting and spelling skills.

2. Handwriting

a) Space between letters in a word and space between words in a sentence.

b) the proportion of parts of the letters; letters should be written in regular size and height

c) The correct direction of pen movements

To have accurate, legible, regular and fluent handwriting, pupils need a lot of practice.

In initial stage, practice in handwriting is best provided through worksheets.

Guidelines for Preparing Writing Worksheets

• Concentrate on a few difficulties faced by your pupils.

• Provide sufficient guidance to ensure pupils do not make errors.

• Evoke the feeling that something has been written even the practice is on single element.

• There must be a sense of purpose in the activity.

Provision of the elements of good handwriting:

a) Formation. Each letter should be well-formed and joined correctly, following the right direction.

b) Slant. All letters must lean the same way, and all downward and upward strokes should be parallel.

c) Size. All letters should be evenly-sized.

d) Alignment. All letters should touch the line, and letters that go above or below the line must do so consistently.

e) Spacing. Spaces between letters and word must be even.

3. Further Copying Activities

•Fun and non-mechanical

•Form of puzzles, games, or cognitively

challenging activities

•Real-life activities such as copying phone

numbers, addresses, titles of story books and

etc.

Making guest lists- practice writing using

alphabet

Classifying words by copying them into tables

Crossword puzzle: copy then words that they

have learnt to fill in the puzzle

After reciting poem, they copy it into exercise book and draw picture to illustrate

it.