Making Sure Young Students Get the Write Stuff : Education: More schools emphasize teaching children to express themselves while they learn to read.

If you’re the parent of a pre school or school-age child, chances are you’ve been told: If you want your children to be good readers, read to them early and often.

But what if you want them to be good writers, too? In the past, it was assumed that the second “R” could be taught later--after kids learned the alphabet and parts of speech.

But that advice is changing as teachers adopt new methods that encourage youngsters to start writing right away. No matter that kids don’t know grammar and punctuation--or even the ABCs, educators say. Give them a crayon and let them scribble. It’s important for children to express their thoughts.

Dorothy Watson, professor of education at the University of Missouri and a 15-year veteran of the elementary school classroom, says kids need to write so they can learn to communicate and express their ideas to others.

“More and more students are writing in order to think,” she says. “When they write in journals, when they write about a book or a science experiment, they’re beginning to generate the questions themselves.” That’s “critical thinking,” a skill educators say today’s students need to develop more fully.

The way schools teach writing has been altered in the past few years, as teachers change the way they teach reading. Central to the change is the “whole-language” movement adopted by many schools. In whole language, reading and writing go hand in hand. Gone are the fill-in-the-blank workbooks and the exercises in which students copy a poem off the board for Mother’s Day. In their place are all kinds of stories from children’s literature, and a class in which children spend as much time writing as reading.

Older, traditional teaching methods started students writing with spelling lists and work sheets of capital letters, nouns and verbs, says Watson, an active supporter of whole language and a former president of the Whole Language Teachers Umbrella. The new methods encourage kids to jump right in and compose.

“Now, you tell them to give it a go and write something,” she says. “They don’t have to wait until they master syntax and can form all the letters correctly. The spelling, grammar, and punctuation all can come later, with the revisions and the help of the teacher,” says Watson.

Parents should start their kids writing early, from about the time they can hold a crayon and put it to paper, says Marna Bunce-Crim, director of elementary education at River College in Nashua, N.H.

For example, parents could ask for their children’s help in writing what they want from the grocery store, she says. “They write down scribbles, but that’s OK. They can read it back to you.”

Grown-ups should look first at what the child is trying to say. Spelling can always be corrected later if the paper is going to have a wider circulation, says Bunce-Crim.

About the worst thing parents can do, says Watson, is to look at a paper a child proudly presents to them and declare it “a mess.”

Bunce-Crim says that it is discouraging for most children to have their ideas shot down right away for neatness and punctuation. “Who cares about the mechanics if there’s nothing on paper? You can’t be a writer without being a risk-taker, and you can’t be a risk-taker if you’re so uptight that every word has to be perfect.”