Every Mark on the Page

Within the article “Every Mark on the Page,” the author describes a variety of points that teachers should cover when educating family and community members on what young children’s writing should look like for their age level. These are very important tactics to learn because, often times, adults get too worked up and worried about how their children are doing in school when they really should not be. On top of this, they sometimes try to put matters into their own hands by overly correcting the child, therefore causing more harm than good. If a particular adult constantly corrects spelling errors, bans their child from using inventive spelling, and makes them copy all of their work without mistakes, they can discourage the child from actually enjoying to write. It ends up taking all of the fun right out to writing for them.

One of the main tactics that the author describes to teachers is that they should show family and community members what early writing looks like. This entails the teacher to display to the adults an anonymous piece of writing that they can then use to make points about writing at that level. The teacher is able to take the writing and go through why the students did what they did and, also, explain why the mistakes are acceptable. This is done as a way to calm the adults down and to make them realize that making mistakes is an alright thing to do for their child’s age. Without mistakes, the children are unable to learn and grow.

The latter half of the article explains how to go about empowering family and community members to support their young writers. The first example given is the open house method. With this, the teachers try to meet with the adults, show them sample pieces of writing, and give them examples of spelling resources. Another way to encourage family and community members is by incorporating important points for them to follow within a weekly newsletter. This way, the adults are reminded often what is the best way to go about encouraging their children’s writing. Lastly, teachers can also hold a writing workshop for family and community members. With this, they can get a more in depth explanation of the practices that they should be following with their child at home.  

Overall, I completely agree with the authors points. I strongly believe that family members can often stunt their child’s educational growth and discourage them from wanting to write in the future. Much like teachers, they need to be made educated of these issues and how to avoid them from happening with their young children. Every child should feel excited and confident about their writing, whether they make errors or not.