ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the drawing and writing journey, starting from when children first notice people around them engaged in writing. It expands on the notion of talking and drawing as early literacy skills that support writing and suggests how adults may use these skills as a scaffold for introducing children to writing at childcare, preschool and/or school. Talking is a 'given', as children learn to interact verbally with those around them. Talking is also a key skill in the development of young writers. Children are surrounded by the talk of their family and members of their community, even before they are born. Talk is important for learning to write, as talking promotes control over the grammatical structures of spoken language and vocabulary development, both of which are predictors of success with early writing with writing critical to literacy learning. Children's talk is important and when combined with drawing, creates a multimodal text.
