Basic Tools for Beginning Writers: How to Teach All the Skills Beginning Writers Need—From Alphabet Recognition and Spelling to Strategies for Self-editing and Building Coherent Text.

Basic Tools for Beginning Writers is aimed at helping teachers seeking to help children develop their writing skills. Schultze’s book provides basic essential tools to writers from kindergarten to grade two, as well as strategies for teachers to motivate students.

The strategies designed for augmenting the writing skills are Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development—writing effective sentences through modelling and encouraging children to collaborate with peers. After outlining these strategies, Schultze focuses on the need for children to acquire the fundamental skills: putting pencil to paper, identifying and making letters of the alphabet, incorporating basic tools into routines and play, becoming phonemically aware, recognizing sound-symbol matches, learning how to spell, and creating a legible, coherent text.

The title of the book suggests that children are capable of mastering skills ranging from alphabet identification to the creation of logical text in a short period; however, the writing process is complex and requires many years of experience beyond grade two.

Schultze’s prose is easy to follow. Each section has a pragmatic approach, illustrating its purpose, basic tools needed to acquire skills, methods that facilitate learning and teaching, and an assessment tool to check whether learning has taken place. It is Schultze’s wisdom and her years of experience as a teacher that shaped the practical approach throughout the book.