What My Third Graders Taught Me About Why Kids Stop Writing

A new National Literacy Trust study confirms what I saw firsthand in my classroom, and points to what actually keeps children writing.

There's a particular look a child gets when writing stops being theirs. I saw it on a lot of small faces in 2017, and I've never quite forgotten it.

That was the year my district adopted a new ELA curriculum, Benchmark Advance: a scripted, test-focused program that was, in nearly every way, the opposite of what I knew about how young children learn to write. The timing was almost funny. I'd just spent my summer at the San Marcos Writing Project's Summer Institute, immersed in knowledgeable, experienced guest speakers sharing best practices for teaching writing to young children. I came back inspired. And then I opened the new curriculum.

It also happened to be my first year tenured in the district. So I made a quiet decision: for writing, I was going to do my own thing.

What I did instead

I gave my students the things the research kept pointing to. Choice in what they wrote. A solid block of uninterrupted writing time. Mentor texts to show them what good writers actually do. And dedicated time each week to share - our "Author's Chair," where they read their own work out loud to each other.

Every morning, we also did something I learned at SMWP’s Summer Institute called Writing Into the Day: a quick write, by hand, for six minutes. Write as much as you can. Don't worry about spelling. Don't worry about handwriting. Just put down whatever pops into your head.

At first, it was hard for a lot of them. Six minutes felt like an eternity. Pencils hovered. But as the year went on, something shifted. They got fluent. They stopped freezing at the blank page. Their writing got longer - by spring, they were filling far more in six minutes than they ever could in the fall. They had found their momentum.

Meanwhile, Benchmark Advance asked for the opposite. One specific prompt each week. Constant instructions to refer back to the weekly reading and "cite" the text, even in narrative and storytelling prompts. (Yes, really. Citations. In a story.) You could actually see the joy being sucked out of their little souls every time we attempted one of those prompts.

Additionally, students encountered a brand-new prompt every single week, which meant there was rarely enough time to actually finish anything. No room to revise, edit, or publish a piece they were proud of. Followed to the letter, the curriculum would have left my students with a folder full of unfinished beginnings, never once seeing a piece of writing all the way through to the end. And even when they did like a prompt, the clock just moved on to the next one. It honestly started to feel like we were teaching kids that they didn’t have to finish anything they started.

And then you'd watch them come alive the moment I let them choose. They lit up for each other at Author's Chair, inspired by what a classmate had dared to try. They actually asked for more writing time. The contrast was anything but subtle.

I want to be fair here. A program like Benchmark Advance isn't the villain of this story, and in the hands of a teacher with room to bend it, I'm sure it can still leave space for real writing. But followed as written and with the quick weekly pacing, it pulled in exactly the wrong direction for young writers. And unfortunately, most teachers (especially new ones) don't feel free to bend it.

The part I couldn't explain away

The following year, my colleagues and I sat down with our leadership team to look at our grade level’s state test scores. My class was one of the inclusion classes, with students who had mild-to-moderate learning disabilities, so I shared it with our SPED teacher. We noticed something neither of us expected: my class had outperformed the other third-grade classes on the writing portion of the state test.

To be clear, I am not a fan of standardized testing, and especially not that particular test, which isn't developmentally appropriate for young children. I won't pretend one data point proves anything on its own. But sitting there, looking at those numbers next to everything I'd watched happen all year, I couldn't call it a coincidence either.

What the research now says out loud

I've been thinking about that year again, because a recent report from the UK’s National Literacy Trust put words to what I felt in my gut back then.

The headline is sobering: in just fifteen years, the share of children who enjoy writing in their free time has almost halved - from nearly half of kids in 2010 down to about 1 in 4 today. The number who write something every day for themselves has fallen from 1 in 4 to 1 in 10. One child told the researchers, plainly, "School has taken my love away from writing."

But the part that stopped me was the why. The children who'd pulled away from writing weren't the ones who couldn't do it. They described writing as something that had become about getting it right - tied to assessment, correction, and pressure, until it felt like a chore or, worse, "not for people like me."

And the children who still loved it? They described exactly what my third graders found that year: autonomy. Most of the keen writers said they were driven by getting to choose what they wrote about. A real audience to share with. And above all, safety. One put it better than I ever could: they loved writing because they could "just write care-free with no one telling me it is bad or wrong."

That's the whole thing, isn't it? Confidence comes before correctness. It always has. Choice, time, a reason to write, and the freedom to be imperfect - those aren't the soft extras. They are the curriculum.

Where it really begins

Here's what I'd add to the report, from where I sit now. By third grade, you're already trying to protect a love of writing - or, too often, repair it. But that love is built much earlier, in the years before anything is ever graded. In the wild scribbles, or the imaginative story a four-year-old tells you while you write it down for them.

That's the work I care about most now, and it's why I built Rooted in Writing - a monthly box for ages 3 to 6 that builds the fine motor foundation and keeps writing joyful, hands-on, and pressure-free, long before a child ever learns to dread the page. Everything's included. You just get to play.

Because the goal was never to get kids writing earlier. It was to keep them from losing the love in the first place.

Research referenced: National Literacy Trust, "Why children and young people do or do not engage with writing in their free time" (2026).