The computer screen may have replaced the notebooks, but writing skills are still crucial to a child's success in an increasingly technological world. The earlier a child masters the ability to write, the greater their chances for succeeding in school and on the job. In the United Kingdom, writing is taught at the primary school level with an emphasis on successive development of skills so that children understand writing as communication. Even great keyboarding skills require writing abilities. The United Kingdom's National Curriculum ensures that primary school children are given the tools they will need for a better future.
Primary school children are split into two levels. Key Stage One children are from ages five to seven years and in their first and second years of school. Key Stage Two children are between ages seven to eleven and in their third to sixth years. Both levels gradually build a pupil's confidence and ability in a series of goals.
In Key Stage One, pupils are taught that writing is enjoyable and valuable, to communicate meaning found in narrative texts, and an introduction to proper spelling and punctuation. Entering their first year, children should know the difference between writing and pictures, and recognize very simple words and their patterns (cat, hat, mat) to thrive at Key Stage One. The following areas briefly describe the goals in each of several important areas for strong writing skills.
1. Composition: By building a solid vocabulary, students learn to sequence events in appropriate order and transfer ideas into sentences that are organized in a clear structure.
2. Planning and drafting: Students write using familiar words and begin to incorporate new ones, develop and assemble ideas, plan and review writing.
3. Punctuation: Students understand punctuation's purpose is to help readers understand material by using sentence structure, full stops, capital letters, question marks and commas.
4. Spelling: Recognizing strategies using advanced sounds, patterns such as consonant clusters, common suffixes and prefixes, and learn to check spelling by using dictionaries and recognizing reasons for misspellings.
5. Handwriting and presentation: First time writers learn how to hold a pencil or pen, to write from left to write and top to bottom of page. They learn letter shapes and uniformity, size and spacing, upper and lower case letters and how to write clearly and neatly.
6. Language structure and Standard English: Students start with the basics of standard written English including word choice and order and the effect on meaning, nouns, verbs and pronouns, and begin linking ideas together in sentences and sentence sequences.
7. Breadth of study: To understand that writing is a form of communication, creativity, recording the past. Writing for remembering and developing ideas. Range of readers in mind should include teachers, other adults, children and the writers themselves, narratives, poems, lists, messages, instructions.
Now students advance to the Key Stage Two Level, where writing skills are developed as essential to thinking and learning, the rules and conventions of standard written English are learned, and students learn to plan, draft and edit their writing assignments. A breakdown of Stage Two expectations includes:
1. Composition: Students build their vocabulary and learn appropriate form and content for writing for organized thinking or entertaining. Planning and drafting: Students revise their draft writings by using proofreading to spot spelling and punctuation errors, and discuss and evaluate their own and others' writings.
2. Punctuation: Advanced concepts of apostrophes for possession, and semi-colons are incorporated into students' writing assignments.
3. Spelling: By now students can break down complicated words into syllables for pronunciation and are aware of the vast array of spelling rules, skilled at using dictionaries and spell checkers.
4. Morphology: An advanced concept where students master the meaning and use of common prefixes and suffixes, word families, roots and origins of words.
5. Handwriting and presentation: Students are now writing and printing legibly, and understand the different styles of writing or printing according to purpose; note taking, formal assignments, maps.
6. Standard English: Varying degrees of formality; letters to friends, formal school assignments, are combined with learning subject-verb agreements and prepositions.
7. Language structure: Word classes and grammatical functions of words, nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, articles. Students master organizing paragraphs and linking ideas.
8. Breadth of study: In writing their ideas, students explore ways to interest the reader, to inform, explain or convey subject information in a clear and understandable format. Students begin to persuade readers using convincing language. The range of readers includes teachers, classmates and other children, community at large and imagined readers.
At completion of these crucial stages of development, primary children in the United Kingdom have mastered their fundamental writing skills and hopefully see writing as an enjoyable part of their school experience. This is the stage where technologically savvy kids might question the need for all that boring grammar, or point to numbers as more important. Whether by pen or by keyboard, effective writing is part of communication and is essential to compete in the ever changing technological and global economy. The National Curriculum provides a solid plan for the United Kingdom's primary school children to become meaningful contributors to society in adulthood, eager to pick up their pens or tackle their keyboards.