Kindergartners, raise your pencils

Six-year-old Christopher Bruno hasn't yet learned to read or spell, but that doesn't keep him from arranging letters to report his adventures every morning at Cashman Elementary School.

On this early spring day, while classmates to his right and left were coloring birthday cakes and roses, he penciled this: "MY SASDR LIST HOR TOT EASTRDY."

Moments later, he stood to interpret his composition for classmates seated on a carpet in a circle.

"My sister lost her tooth yesterday," he explained. All applauded, including two instructors, who had nothing but praise for his intrepid foray into use of the written word.

A quarter-century ago, placing journals into the hands of preliterate kindergartners would have been unthinkable. Conventional wisdom held that they must learn to spell before trying to write. Otherwise, the thinking went, written errors would become bad habits, and the television generation would never learn certain essentials of writing.

Today, education theorists are generally more sympathetic than their predecessors were to the idea of developmental learning.

What looks like scribbling and misspelling to adults might actually represent progress for a 5-year-old - at least according to those who promote journal keeping in the classroom.

Such thinking has given rise to a small but steady movement to get children writing early and to worry about details later.

"I haven't found a lot of adults writing letters backward," says Jerome Harste, professor of teacher education and a language-education expert at Indiana University. "I think sometimes we latch onto behaviors of kids and take them way too seriously. A mark on a wall is a small price to pay for a literate child."

In Kathy Scholtz's classroom at Cashman Elementary here, children start making their marks with crayon and pencil as soon as they arrive at 8:30 a.m.

Each child opens a "book" - stapled blank pages with his or her name on the cover - and gets to work. Illustrations tend to hit the parchment first - houses, gardens, dinosaurs, and army scenes. Then, with gentle nudging from instructors, each artist takes a shot at authorship by carving letters that will help jog the memory to tell a story.

That same day, Tyler Wile sketched battle scenes with guns and soldiers. With encouragement from teaching assistant Patricia Dupere, he wrote the narrative: "I M SOTING BAD GIZ." Translation: "I am shooting bad guys."

"They put down what they hear so they can go back and read what they wrote," Ms. Dupere explains. "If we wrote the correct spelling, they wouldn't go back and read it. They'll get that eventually."

Not everyone is quite so optimistic, however. Krista Kafer of the Heritage Foundation, for instance, says good habits need to be ingrained from the start - especially in inner-city schools, where children might not have parents who correct their spelling or grammar.

"It doesn't matter if you have enthusiasm for the written word. You can't read," Ms. Kafer says. "Why would you want to steer them in the wrong way, and later encourage them in the right way? In the end, as important as creativity is, accuracy is more important."

Only about 10 percent of kindergarten classrooms across the country use journals, according to Professor Harste's estimate. Most don't, in his opinion, either because they've always used other teaching methods or because they believe in rote spelling lessons first.

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