Writing is an important componant of balanced literacy.
Start by building the children's confidence. Create physical, pedagogical and emotional environments to support their development as writers. In the beginning stages, try to get the kids to write something for every spoken word. The magic line functions as a place holder when the child can't identify any of the letters in the word. One way to support writing is to create crowns for some of the basic, high frequency words that do not have regular phonetic spellings.