Mobile, Ala.--Children in preschool through second grade can now learn how to write based on strategies in a new book “Write Now! Publishing with Young Authors PreK-Grade 2.” The authors of this unique publication are Dr. Karyn Wellhousen Tunks, assistant professor, and Dr. Rebecca McMahon Giles, associate professor, in the department of leadership and teacher education in the College of Education at the University of South Alabama.

Typically in schools, the writing process is introduced around the third grade. Write Now! offers a simple and practical way to help children write and learn the rewards of publishing at an earlier age.

“The challenge was learning how to help young children understand what writing is and how to move their thoughts and words to paper,” said Tunks. “Students in grades lower than the third grade use non-conventional forms of writing. In preschool and kindergarten, they are just beginning to learn about letters and do not understand sentence structure. So we have created four strategies to help them learn how to write and why they should write.”

The four strategies, according to the authors are Dictating Oral Anecdotes, which helps children understand how speech is connected to writing; Translating Kid Writing, which gives young writers their first taste of composing and an opportunity to take risks with writing; Creating Cooperative Chronicles, which introduces children to revising and editing through the energy of group work; and Encouraging Independent Authors, which brings it all together for writers’ first on their own writing experiences.

Tunks and Giles began working on the book in 2004. During the 2005-06 academic year, Giles was awarded a sabbatical so that she could go back into the classroom and teach kindergartners, using this experience to implement their ideas for the book in progress.

“I wanted to go back into the classroom and update my own experiences working with young children,” explained Giles. “Our work had reached a point where it needed to be field tested, and the classroom was the perfect place to implement our strategies.” Her class moved quickly from dictating to kid writing. “I was working with high level kindergartners, and it didn’t take them long to understand the connection between oral and written language. They soon began writing words the way they sounded. These were readable but not conventional.”

“They also wrote a cooperative chronicle, where the students worked together in a group to write a story about their field trip to Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. We did our first draft, and the children started with the last thing that happened, which is the most recent in their minds. We began editing by putting things in chronological order,” said Giles.

Giles recalled that when they prepared to break for lunch, one of the students remembered the doughnuts had glaze and not icing on them. So they later changed the word. She said this is important because the students understood the importance of word selection during the editing process to make the story better.

“We want to publish, celebrate, and build on their writing,” said Tunks. “Once they feel really good about their writing, then we make it better by adding or changing words. We introduce editing as a group project. If you immediately started revising and editing, which is part of the writing process, the young students would be discouraged.”

During their research, Tunks and Giles studied the work of Elizabeth Sulzby, a Professor of Education at the University of Virginia, who identified children’s spontaneous forms of writing, often referred to as types of kid writing.

“Having witnessed young children’s early writing attempts as early childhood teachers and also having taught the concept in our university courses, we were familiar with research on young children’s writing development, particularly that conducted by Elizabeth Sulzby,” explained Tunks. “Sulzby studied the forms of writing young children use when they begin experimenting with print as a way to communicate and identified six basic types, which are drawing, scribble writing, letter-like forms, letter strings, invented spelling and conventional spelling.”

While working on the book during the field study, the authors identified a new form of kid writing. Tunks and Giles collected about 750 journal entries from Aug 22, 2005-January 20, 2006. As they reviewed and coded the entries, a seventh form of spontaneous writing used by the children emerged, and they labeled it “environmental printing.”

“I noticed the children were using the print available in the classroom for various purposes,” said Giles. “They would look around the room and identify words for their journal entries.”

Each chapter in this book includes inspiring quotes and personal vignettes from the authors. It’s informative, fun, and easy to read with examples and photos throughout. Tunks and Giles are excited and confident their new book will help young children journey from scribbles to letters, to words, to sentences, to purposeful writing.

Tunks will be conducting an in-service presentation on the book for the Education Research and Inservice Center at the University of North Alabama from 8:30 a.m.-11:30 a.m. Monday, July 9 in Florence, Ala. The book is available at Barnes and Nobles in Mobile and Spanish Fort.