Page 103 - Reading Nest - The Supportive Literacy Environment Handbook

Learning to write correctly

Literacy is associated with writing correctly by many adults, including teachers. In the

Estonian tradition someone who makes many spelling mistakes in a short sentence is
considered illiterate rather than literate, however, the person may be aware of

phonemes and phonemic analysis yet might have little experience in writing rules.

The following skills can be distinguished in learning orthography, the development of

which resembles skills described above and is not in a hierarchical order:

• scribbling and ‘reading’ letters (letter-like forms), random writing of letter-like
symbols (M, W, I, O);

• writing of some letters e.g. the first letter of one’s name ( first, somewhat

distorted and starting from a casual point);
• writing letters in one’s name, first in random, then in the correct order;

• copying – writing a copy of texts from the surroundings, this is possible without

knowing all the letters;