Writing is a critical early literacy skill. However, the development of early writing is not well understood, and may be affected by children’s self-regulation ability. The present study sought to accomplish three goals, 1) provide a rich description of children’s skills and growth across four diverse writing tasks, 2) examine how self-regulation is related to writing for each task, and 3) investigate whether self-regulation is related to each task over time. Two hundred and two preschool children were assessed on name writing, letter writing, word writing, and story writing tasks, as well as a self-regulation measure. Children demonstrated growth from fall to spring in each task, and their performance indicated the following rank order of ascending difficulty: letter, name, word, story. Regression models indicated that children who scored higher on self-regulation in the fall were more likely to score higher on each writing task in the fall, and this was also true for fall self-regulation predicting spring word writing when controlling for children’s fall writing. However, this relation was not found for spring name, letter, and story writing. These results indicate that a variety of writing tasks are accessible to and appropriate for young children, ordinal data may be the most accurate way to measure writing within these tasks, and while self-regulation is related to writing it may not be as defining for children’s growth as their initial writing level.
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