Despite the importance of continuity between educational phases, little is known about continuity/discontinuity in writing instruction across pre-school and primary education. The main purpose of this study is to understand children's early writing development within these learning contexts. The study was carried out in three pre-school and three primary classrooms located in a city in the middle of Turkey with four children from each class, a total of 12 focus children, and a total of six

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... ers, the teacher of each class. This study traces early writing skills developed by children in pre-school and primary classrooms in order to answer the following questions: How are teaching practices in the two contexts similar or different? Is there continuity between pre-school education and primary education? How do children in these settings respond to these different contexts? Qualitative data collected from the same cohort of children as they moved through the end of pre-school and the beginning of primary education show children's responses to different classroom practices. Data indicate that children engage with different activities in these two settings, and teachers adopt different teaching approaches. There is a more free environment for teachers to organise activities in terms of children's needs and abilities in pre-school education, whereas a more product-based approach shapes pedagogy in primary education. Children in this study developed their pre-writing skills in pre-school and continued with more formal ways of learning how to write in primary education. However, there is a need for a more coherent transition between the two settings that account for what is known about early years' writing development.