This resource allows you to record your own reflections after watching the video below.
Video transcript
Associate Professor Stacey Campbell
Researcher in early years English and literacy
The QKLG area of communicating supports children in expressing their ideas and feelings and mark-making is one way that children can express their ideas.
The sequence of writing development begins with children wanting to have their stories written down, so they'll tell an adult their story, and the adult will dictate that story down for them. From there children will start to mark-make and present marks on the page often scribble like and these will then start taking on the form of like zigzags or circles. From here you'll actually start to see children develop letters. And they're kind of not the conventional letters in words to begin with. And they might actually have a string of letters together. So that string of letters, often won't have a space between them, and they wouldn't make sense to us as adults, but it makes sense to the children.
So, teachers and educators can help children develop mark-making and early writing through intentionally providing writing tools in the writing area, but it's more than just keeping the equipment and the ideas in one dedicated area. For example, if the children are playing in the block area and they're talking about how things are designed, teachers can then think about, well, what materials can I put into the block area to support the children?
Maybe perhaps showing them what a map looks like or what a building construction map looks like. So it's bringing in and thinking about what the children are doing now, but also forward planning for intentionally supporting, ways that children can mark-make and begin to do early writing, but through, say, dramatic play or through block corner, or outside.
Educators and teachers can be really purposeful about mark-making and planning for it, for example, making cards. What you'll need to do is think about exploring with the children the purpose of cards, that we write them to maybe say thank you. We write them to say happy birthday. Perhaps making a card to say thank you for somebody who's come to visit the kindy or the early learning centre and from there maybe creating a post-box where the children can actually post the cards. So it's not just putting out the materials for them, it is actually explaining why print is purposeful, and making it meaningful to the children and the environment that you're working in.
So, say in the sandpit, you can have writing materials there, or next to water play where children can write down or document their learning and their understanding. Also, something like having sticks available out near the sandpit for children to mark-make in the sand.
I think it's really important for educators and teachers to be really intentional about the way that they're supporting mark-making, remembering that it is a way that children are beginning to learn about sounds and to learn about the alphabet, and that writing has a purpose and it needs to be really meaningful, and also within the context of your own early learning centre or kindergarten.
- Last updated:
- 18 December 2025
