Maya is in second grade. On Wednesday of each week, students in her classroom receive an object. With this object, they are asked to create something and write about it using details. They bring the “imagination creation” and description back to school on Friday to share it with their peers. Maya brings her writing home on Monday and most often the feedback provided is “great job.” After doing these imagination creations for about two months, I looked more closely and was struck by a few things in Maya’s writing. First, her spacing was getting progressively worse. She was putting spaces in the middle of words, connecting words that shouldn’t be connected, and tossing capital letters in the middle of words. As a former English teacher and her mother, I decided to ask her about it. The conversation went something like this:

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