Jot It? Got It!
By Mark W.F. Condon, Unite for Literacy vice president
Jotting something down is a useful habit. It helps us remember something that may get lost in distractions if we don’t make note of it. “Call Peter—2:30.” “Yard bags.” “Card for Mo.” Jotting is also terrific for helping children understand the WHY of self-created pictures and words.
Think about the children and even adults who constantly forget to do their chores, remember a social event, put things away, etc. It might not be mission critical stuff, but it can be important. Jotting notes-to-self helps us remember the seemingly endless list of big and little things to do to keep our lives running smoothly.
Adults often have little notepads that fit in our pockets, purses, bags or backpacks. Or we use the note feature on our phones. Why? Because we know that often, if we don’t capture a thought when it pops into our head, we’ll forget it.
At Indiana University’s Campus Children’s Center, a child care center for families of faculty and staff, teachers integrated reading and writing into everything they did with little ones to demonstrate the utility of print. For instance, they created “Don’t Forget” slips, which are skinny strips of paper featuring a sketch of a finger with a bow tied around it that little ones (and their teachers) use when they need to remember something.
One afternoon 3-year-old Kristy discovered there were no paper towels in the dispenser in the kids’ bathroom. Her solution? Pen a note to Harold, the janitor, to remind him “Don’t forget the paper towels.” Meanwhile, 4-year-old Jessa created a note for herself that included text plus a sketch. “What are you remembering?” asked her teacher. “I’m going to remember to bring a dolly tomorrow to play with.” Running her finger beneath her writing, she said, “It says, ‘Don’t—DO remember to bring a dolly tomorrow.’”
Taking notes is one of the easiest and most delightful literacy lessons we can teach young children. Learning to jot builds an essential foundation for early literacies: personal sketching, writing and reading. That’s because jotting meets a personal need to remember, and helps children get a stronger hold on their own responsibilities along with their random musings and secret plans.
Little kids love to have a special something in their pocket to share with their friends and family. If one of those somethings is a little pad with a manageably small pencil or crayon then even preschoolers can enjoy drawing or primitively writing things they might need to do or wish to remember or share. We adults can model this habit for the children in our lives several times every day to promote their appreciation of the power of sketching, writing and then reading their reminders. For the smallest children, jotting instills essential conceptions of literacy: We write things to remember them. We write things to share with others.
Jotting is a perfect, always-there, literacy experience, and it is never too early to help a child old enough to hold a pencil or crayon to appreciate and adopt easy ways to develop the habit of recording something for later. Adults just need to clearly show kids that we jot and encourage them to try it, too.
Of course, early on, little kids will surely lose that first tablet or pencil (and maybe the second and third), so have a backup stash along with sufficient patience as they grow to fully understand this clear lesson in the personal power of literacy. The gentle teaching of jotting demonstrates the value of everyday reading and writing and can grow into a hugely valuable lifelong literacy habit. Casually drawing kids’ attention to our own jotting helps them appreciate why we make notes and introduces them to the many contexts in which note taking is so helpful.