When I was studying early childhood education, there was one sentence in a textbook that puzzled me greatly:

“Writing is easier than reading; children learn to write before they learn to read.”

I remember thinking: How can a child write if they cannot even recognise words?

Only later did I understand what the book meant by “writing”. It was not referring to formal handwriting. It meant output — expressing inner thoughts through visible symbols or forms. In that sense, a child’s scribbles on paper are also a kind of writing.

And gradually, a cycle began to form in my mind. Children are born already filled with thoughts and emotions, and from the very beginning they try to express themselves in their own ways — only we adults cannot yet understand them. Then they begin using shapes, marks, and strange-looking symbols, adding fragments of characters here and there, creating what we dismiss as “scribbles”. Later, once we teach them more words, they slowly learn to express those same thoughts through language.

As for formal writing itself — everyone knows that takes a very long time.

So while waiting for children’s muscles and coordination to mature, I began wondering: Is there a way for children to express their thoughts now, while also preparing the other skills they will eventually need for writing?

I understood very clearly that having a head full of thoughts but no way to release them could not possibly be healthy for anyone’s emotional wellbeing. How many times had a child tugged at me, saying they wanted to tell me “a secret”, only for me to reply, “Wait a moment… wait a moment…”?

Children have no choice but to wait obediently. But you can almost see it happen — their shoulders slowly droop, like a balloon losing air. I wanted my child to grow up happy.

So in my own mind, I quietly gave “writing” a new definition. And then I started searching for tools. To me, it felt a little like trying to open a tin: if your fingers are not strong enough yet, perhaps you simply use a screwdriver instead. I believed the tools did not need to be complicated. Perhaps something very simple would be enough.

Was I being naïve? Too careless? At the time, all I could really do was treat my own child like a little experimental guinea pig.

At home, I began allowing my child complete freedom in how to “write”:

with hands, with building blocks, with characters mixed together with phonetics and drawings;

on old newspapers, on steamed-up mirrors… Anywhere was allowed, as long as the walls and furniture survived intact.

Sometimes, I would let my child speak while I wrote things down for them — rather like the old letter-writers who used to sit on the streets writing letters for others. Other times, I encouraged my child to cut words out from magazines or leaflets and rearrange them into sentences.

Before long, my child began “leaving messages” everywhere.

Sometimes little notes would secretly appear beside me. Many of them took me enormous effort to decode back then. Yet those tiny “secret messages” have all been carefully kept to this day. To me, they are more precious than ancient classics.

Later, Sagebooks published reading cards. But I tirelessly emphasised one thing: reading cards are tools for writing — not tools for drilling character recognition.

With these reading cards, children can freely build sentences and express meanings, just as my own child once used cut-out words to create little notes.

When I later revisited that early childhood education textbook, I found myself agreeing deeply with its explanation. Writing is a direct process: thoughts travel from the brain, through the hand, and onto paper. Reading, however, requires an extra step. Someone else must first turn their thoughts into written symbols through writing; then we must decode and interpret those symbols in order to understand them.

In that sense, reading really does involve more steps than writing.

And perhaps what we have always been trying to do is this: to find a meeting point somewhere within that long process of encoding and decoding language — and then gently take the child by the hand, walking with them step by step towards the other side.