When I talk to parents about how their young children will learn to write, most of them tell me that the first step will be when they can write their own name. While this is an exciting milestone in any child's development, it is only the tip of a very big iceberg.
The body of the iceberg should contain knowledge about how letters are formed in the child's culture, and how these relate to sounds in their language. Ideally, this understanding will have been gained through practice and experimentation, by making lots of marks, in lots of different ways, and with lots of different materials.
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