Early writing during pre-kindergarten is increasingly the subject of basic research and applied classroom practice. Findings from multiple disciplines highlight the role of young children’s print-related skills in predicting and enhancing later literacy abilities.

This growing body of research, however, lacks a refined model of writing development for this age group. Moreover, the early literacy field needs streamlined, valid assessments of writing progression from scribble lines to letters, first words, and sentences.

In this study I investigate the writing development of 62 children (ages 3 and 4) across six months in a state-funded pre-K program. The Play Plan, a daily activity from the Tools of the Mind curriculum that includes children’s speech, drawing, and writing, served as the source of repeated measures. I created a synthetic, 10-point coding system (Early Writing-10; EW10) to score the continuum of early writing across an average of 16 weekly samples per child. The inter-coder agreement was excellent (r = .94, p < .001). Findings from Hierarchical Linear Modeling demonstrate that growth in early writing was substantial, highly variable, and often rapid across the 24 weeks sampled. The overall shape of the trajectory yielded significant linear, quadratic, cubic, and quartic trends. Among predictor variables, only name-writing ability, assessed at school entry, strongly predicted writing scores at the end of the investigation, but univariate analyses showed higher writing abilities for 4-year-olds than 3-year-olds. Three trajectory profiles of early writing development were categorized: slower, incremental, and rapid.

Future steps include examining the trajectory scores as predictors of subsequent literacy development, evaluating the EW10 scoring system in larger and more diverse samples, and extending it to more advanced writing development in kindergarten. I discuss implications for a developmental model of early writing and for the use of early writing assessments by researchers and educators.