Welcome, Parents, Grandparents, Caregivers! I’m Janet Kierstead, here with an activity for you and your child to enjoy, next time you go grocery shopping.
I’m sharing it to introduce you to the concept of Key Words.* These are the 1 or 2 words your child uses to refer to something they’re very interested in.
Interest is a powerful magnet for skill and concept development. So, we use the child’s interest in their own Key Words to show them how their own “talk” looks, written down. This fascinates them, and they want to do it, too.
So, from then on, we use Key Words as the basis for learning to both read and write. To be sure a child develops skills with this, I’ve created a series of simple follow-up activities for Key Words. They become slightly more complex as the child grows, so that before long, they’re able to write on their own.
These activities are known as The Steps. With them, we can integrate phonics, spelling, letter formation, sounding out words, sight words, etc. into the Key Word, writing process. So, without actually realizing it, they’ve learn to write.
Writing skills readily transfer to reading. As a result, a child is learning to both read and write at the same time, just by working with their own Key Words.
If you print out the directions and try it, I think you’ll find it’s easy to do and that a child quickly learns from and enjoys doing it.
Discover What Else You Can Do to Develop Writing and Reading Skills
If you enjoy this this simple activity and want to do more with it, you’ll see how to carry it forward, beginning with Write/Read Naturally! That page begins to show you how to make Key Words and The Steps the basis for a comlete reading/writing program. Pages in that section discuss how to modify the procedures for preschool and for primary-age children.
Among other things, you’ll see how writing skills readily transfer to reading simple story books. Since the move into books is a critical phase, we need to be sure the child continues to feel confident with print. So, for help with that transition, I’ve provided a link to a series of videos showing how to smooth the way for an emergent reader to successfully move into books.
The section on Phonics shows you how to help your child build a sound foundation for what will ultimately become spelling and sounding out words. You can also see how to take an older child into “Real Life” Projects, aimed at developing the higher-level thinking skills involved in investigation, analysis and multi-media reporting.
Finally, in that section on projects you’ll discover how to involve a child in “Action-Based Projects.” There, they attempt to make a positive difference in something they’re interested in and/or are concerned about in their own life or in the world around them.
Rationale: The Child’s Natural Learning Strategy
As you explore other sections on this website, you’ll repeatedly find mention of how a child learns naturally. In case you haven’t seen that yet — here’s an overview of the thinking behind this approach:
Children are natural mimics! 
They can easily absorb and copy what we do,
And they will do that spontaneously — if they find it interesting.
It’s how they learn to speak, and they’ll also do it with
Reading, Writing, and Projects!
We just need to be a little more intentional about it than we are with speech.
So, that’s what this website is designed to help you do.
If you’d like to keep in touch, join the Facebook Group devoted to sharing these ideas. (See button on the left, below.)
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* Sylvia Ashton-Warner developed the concept of Key Words and described in her book, Teacher. She explains that a Key Word is “the caption for a child’s mind picture.” And it’s always about something with strong meaning to them.