Writing with Pens

During the summer of 2017, I went to a K-2 writing institute for beginners in Barcelona. I had 5+ years of experience teaching reading and writing workshop, and I felt like I had more to learn. Most things the presenters talked about I knew to be true, so I just smiled and nodded in agreement. Then, I heard one presenter talk about revision pens. I wondered if she was thinking of older writers, so I didn’t give the idea much thought until I realized that other kindergarten teachers were also talking about using pens.

“Wait, you mean letting the students use pens to write?” I asked the presenter. You could hear the disbelief in my voice. She responded, “Oh, yes. Kindergarteners write with pens.” I quickly looked around, hoping to find someone as shocked as I was, but I found no one. Then I leaned in and began to listen as they shared the benefits of allowing young writers to use pens. I felt my high walls come down, and I decided I’d give it a try in the fall.

As with many new things I’ve tried in my class, I made sure to connect with others who could offer guidance and answer my questions. It didn’t take long for me to convert. Right away, my classroom became a place where we used pens for everything, including Math. When I moved from KG to Grade 3, I took the pens with me and now, I am advocate for the use of pens in all grades. An idea can sound crazy but it doesn’t mean it’s a bad one; sometimes crazy ideas are the best ideas. I should never forget that.

Here are the main selling points I make when someone wants to pick my brain about my love for pens:

Emergent Writing

The handwriting benefits are the first ones teachers notice. Practicing letter formation is best when the strokes leave a more visible mark. My friend and PreK teacher gives her 4-year-olds flair pens for pre-writing activities. These pens set emergent writers up for success.

When kindergarten writers begin to label, they are exploring with letters and sounds. During this process, they will get words wrong, and they need to be risk-takers to eventually learn and apply spelling strategies. They must be willing to try something, get it wrong, and try again. Very early on, writers begin to question their writing. Often, they’ll ask an adult if they wrote something correctly. This is the moment when most adults intervene and make spelling suggestions. The message this gives is, “You’ll probably get it wrong often, and I will know how to fix it.”

Emergent writers learn to write what they hear and write as much as they can. Later in the writing process, we teach them editing strategies that are appropriate to their level. Young writers don’t edit as they draft. The primary focus is to put as many words as we can on each page. We all want to teach them how to spell, but we can’t teach spelling strategies on a blank page. Volume and confidence must come first.

As writers begin to learn more spelling strategies, they will hesitate when writing more challenging words. They need to feel confident enough to give it a try and keep the pen moving, writing as much as they can; if they get something wrong, they just cross it out and keep going. This supports volume, flow, and risk-taking!

When writers become accustomed to erasing each word that seems wrong, they slow down and shift their attention to spelling accuracy. I know adults that relate to this way of writing, stopping to fix something and losing track of what they wanted to write. Adults can easily pick it back up. Emergent writers have a harder time doing this. Focusing on errors affects one’s confidence.

Pens are the way to go. They support volume, confidence, and independence. Teachers will be able to teach editing strategies later in the writing process because there will be tons of words on each page to practice with!

Process, Not Product

Writing is scary. I’ve said that many times. One of the scariest things for me about writing is wondering what the final product will look like. Funny enough, this is the same concern I see in most of the writers I teach, from Kindergarten to Grade 4. I haven’t worked much with Grade 5, so I can’t know for sure, but I can imagine the situation being very similar.

I believe that to make writing less scary, we have to make it about the process, not the product. If we all know the demons that come along with writing, then why are we feeding them? Drafting with tools that shout “fix it!” does this. This is why we teach writers about the writing process and how there is a lot of work that writers do before they even worry about checking for spelling errors in the final product. Rehearsing several leads or endings, adding dialogue, describing the setting, building tension… these are skills that need to be the focus before editing.

When writers have a pencil and an eraser in their hands, most likely, they will begin to erase words that don’t look right or ideas that they’re not sure of; moving past this urge is one of the hardest things to unlearn as a writer. I suffer from it each time I write. I hear writer friends relate to the same issue. Do you know where I don’t see it? In writers who forget about erasers. Getting used to the “cross-out” strategy when writing with a pen allows writers to ride the “flow wave” a bit longer. They learn to stay in their piece to make use of revision strategies and produce pieces of writing that will look messy at first but have a stronger voice. As I always tell my students, messy is good!

Revision comes before editing. We teach writers, not individual pieces of writing, as Calkins says. Writing conventions matter, and we must know when to teach writers their function in the text they produce. Using a pen vs. using a pencil with an eraser is crucial in delivering this message.

Making Mistakes

The idea of teaching students about having a growth mindset has been floating around for years. The idea of learning from mistakes is easy to say but not so much to teach, especially when our actions that convey the opposite. I know how hard it is to let go as teachers. We feel that it is our responsibility to make sure students learn things the right way. This can trick us into overseeing opportunities to teach the importance of making mistakes and seeing them, meaning allowing students to make mistakes.

When I taught Grade 3 Math, I remember going over my students’ notebooks and studying how they had solved problems. I was able to do this because they used pens during class. They couldn’t erase anything. Some of them would cross out numbers or just start over on a new page. Some would write, “Oops! Check the next page,” where they had tried a second time. These mistakes gave me a lot of information, but they also helped students see where they had taken the wrong turn.

It was hard to convince them to do this. They thought I only wanted to see the right answer. Eventually, they felt more comfortable with making their mistakes visible, to me and to others. Many students noticed how they were not the only ones getting things wrong the first time. We had partnerships coach each other and give feedback by studying the work shown on each page. They were analyzing the mistakes to try again. Before, when students used pencils for this, they would erase whatever they thought was wrong, and you would only see the final result. The process that led to that understanding (or lack of) was erased.

Such a simple switch, using pens, made it possible for students to learn in more meaningful ways. It also helped redefine what it meant for them to make mistakes. And when I think about it, I honestly had no reason to defend the use of erasers.

So yeah, I’m all for writing with pens.