During your child's early years of development , their writing skills will go through lots of changes and stages.
The videos below are a guide to help you as parents to understand these stages and how best to support this development . The first video displays the stage that many of our nursery children enter in September, then working slowly though the other stages to the final stage which is the aim for the end of Nursery.
Please remember every child will develop at a different pace and these videos are a guide only to support you and your child.
Stage 1
During this stage your child may experiment with the writing tools, drawing lines, scribbles and circles. They do not always tell you what they have drawn and if they do it will be when they have finished.
Stage 2
During this time your child will begin to draw recognisable basic pictures but will still not talk about the drawing until they have finished .
Stage 3
During this stage you child will start to talk about their drawings as they draw. They may tell you about the different parts and features. Talking and relating it to things they already know.
Stage 4
During this stage , as with the last your child will talk about their picture as they draw and add detail . they will also begin to add different marks to their picture to represent writing. These marks may not yet look like letters but they will be much different to their drawings.
Stage 5
During this stage your child will talk in detail about their pictures and will add much more detail to their drawings . They will begin to label their drawings with their own name and initial sounds of the objects they have drawn.
As your child's writing develops they will begin to practise writing their names. At this stage it is critical that they are taught the correct formation. It is very difficult to undo incorrect formation later in the child's development.
At Irk Valley we follow the letter-join formation which you can see below. Please follow this formation when practising with your child, these letters can be seen by clicking below.
As well as drawing and writing your children will learn to use these skills during literacy lessons. This can be done by using story maps or simply to label a picture. See the videos below for examples of this.
nursery literacy skills story map
Story maps are a great way to recall a familiar story with a young child. The one in the video is from our story used this year dear zoo, but this can be don...
Nursery Literacy Skills labelling initial sounds
As an early writer your child will practise writing just the initial sounds in words .
