Chapter 10: A Tributeto Donald Graves: Reprinted from the Early Childhood Education Assembly News Volume 1, Issue 2

As a “reading person” one of the things I discovered—before I ever met Don Graves—was that children had to see themselves in literacy in order to become literate. By “seeing themselves in literacy,” I mean that children had to, in some way, personally identify with the story and the characters they are reading about. Don Graves helped me see that this is as true for writing as it is for reading.

By observing young children closely I began to notice that the child’s name was—almost without exception—their “language laboratory.” The first letters children mastered were the letters in their name. By rearranging these letters they often began to create text. My daughter Alison at age 3, for example, began rearranging the letters in her name to write her first story which consisted of a’s, l’s, i’s, s’s, o’s and n’s in all sorts of combinations.