Dora Learns to Write Right

This week was a very big week as far as the maturing of my grammatical knowledge goes. We took a look at a story of a young student named Dora, who was just beginning to read and write her own stories. Her understanding of the language was pretty cloudy, as she wrote words together without spaces, and then progressed to putting periods in between the words for some reason. Eventually, through examples and some guidance from her teacher, she started to grasp sentence structure and was soon writing complete sentences on her own!

In class we organized a Socratic circle to discuss the reading on Dora, and analyze the process behind her writing. Instead of a fishbowl discussion, we had the whole class sit in a circle, which in my opinion, was a better system for talking about a certain chunk of reading. Everybody input what they thought to be the main message of the text as we looked at what worked for teaching Dora how to write.

Much of the class, including myself, focused on the fact that the teacher let Dora write misspelled words and even let her run the sentences together LIKDIS. Dora’s first sentences were extremely hard to decipher, but she was showing progress and the teacher wanted to foster that. I can’t remember who mentioned it in our class, but they commented on the fact that by not breaking her spirits she was actually being taught the wrong way. She could grow accustomed to these bad habits in writing, and the concepts of writing these wrong sentences could stick. However, as evident by her spelling and lack of understanding of words, I think she needed to be taught slowly but surely.

Dora’s progression is a classic example of different learning styles, and what it takes to finally achieve the common goal. In this case, the goal was being able to form a grammatically correct sentence (at least at a 1st grade reading level). Through practice and daily work, Dora grasped the concepts and was soon teaching her fellow classmates the tricks she had learned. It just goes to show that different children can learn differently, and take different approaches to achieve the goal in the end. My question is: how important is it to teach kids the right way the first time? In Dora's case, she takes a unique and extended approach to writing sentences, but eventually gains understanding. What is your opinion?