The Rising Star Scaffolding Guide: Supporting Young Children's Early Spelling Skills

Abstract

Supporting early writing skills in pre-kindergarten lays an important foundation for later writing achievement as well as reading achievement. Specifically, encouraging children to write affords teachers the opportunity to provide scaffolds to improve spelling development. Teachers, however, tend to provide more support than necessary to guide children's early spelling, which may stifle children's opportunities to engage in important thinking that helps them to grow in their literacy knowledge. In this article, we introduce the Rising Star Scaffolding Decision Guide, a step-by-step framework for teachers to use when selecting instructional moves to support spelling development while engaging in one-on-one writing interactions with children. We describe the types of scaffolds that teachers can use with children, with an emphasis on low-support scaffolds (RISE) and high-support scaffolds (STAR). We include examples of teacher–child interactions to illustrate specific scaffolding techniques based on children's writing attempts.