Every Mark on the Page

I thought this article was very interesting and I like how it brought up the point that parents often worry about their child's writing because they aren't comparing it with other children of the same age. Parents might think that their child is making too many spelling mistakes or not having good punctuation when in actuality they are right at the level they should be. I found it interesting that parents have a pretty good idea about how to help their children with reading but not with writing. The reading said that parents often took the fun out of writing by correcting all their mistakes and having them redo their work. And I do think that it's true that we usually notice the weaknesses in writing before we notice the strengths which isn't beneficial to the child. I remember when we were doing field work at University one of my classmates said that their kindergartener case study student was using commas, they weren't in the right place but still! Sharon told us to praise the student for it instead of telling them where the commas are supposed to go. Sometimes we have to let things go because if we tell the student all of their errors at once then they will be discouraged.
    At the elementary school I work at we do power half hour where the kids have to do homework for 30 minutes, if they don't have homework they can either write sentences or read a book. Whenever a student brings me up their paper and I see a handful of mistakes I usually just pick one for them to work on. If its spelling then I write down the correct way to spell a word and have them copy it 3 times. Then if it's an older student they will come back and I will take the paper and ask them how to spell the word just to see if copying it helped them any. We do need to take things slowly with children when they are learning how to write, like the reading said, writing is more than good handwriting and spelling. Writing is a form of communication.