Reading/Writing connection

we moved this school year when my LD son( who sounds like yours without the fine motor delays) was in 5th grade

This school has a huge emphasis on writing and they have worked hard with my son to strengthen those skills(It was the only remediation they eagerly agreed to) They use the pillar method where it is a step by step almost fill in the blanks teaching strategy for writing

He has improved tremendously and I swear it has helped his reading along. He is still below grade level but I just “feel” it made a difference for him-helped the words stick somehow. His spelling of common use words also grew.

My son also has had severe articulation delays since age 2-9 yrs of speech therapy. I have had two very experienced teachers say he will not do laguage arts at grade level until the speech issues are resolved.

This wasnt said in a :”hurry up and get more speech therapy” way but in a “it all fits together and it takes all the pieces for the growth to occur”

I guess I see that happening with the writing and am beginning to believe them

Writing is usually the last thing to be remediated. We are working on this now as well.
I agree with Mary,” All the pieces need to be in place for growth to occur.”
My son is mostly remediated in pieces he can spell, write neatly, come up with great ideas, undertands punctuation etc but he can not put all of it together to write well.

Writing is a whole brain activity. All the pieces need to be there AND all the pieces have to work together. My son’s develpmental optometrist recommended a program specifically for putting all the pieces together that is similar to brain gym.

He has been correct about everything else with my son so we shall see.

PS. My son hates these exercises which in the past has been a sure sign he needs them.

I’m not a teacher, just a mother who over the years has become concerned about writing instruction. I don’t know anything about the use of OG for creative writing, a term I assume you are using to encompass the sort of expository writing that is the huge bulk of the writing schoolchildren and adults actually do.

My view to your immediate question: I think your instinct that he would make more progress in writing if it was tied to what he is reading is a good one. I might even go a bit further and postulate that this approach would have the effect of also strengthening his reading.

The next question: how to do this for a reluctant writer like your son? There is one approach out there that I really like for kickstarting writing. The premise is that a big thing that keeps kids from writing is that they don’t know what to write about and are stymied from writing right from the start. To overcome this, you start to teach kids writing by having them rewrite paragraphs they have read. This approach, called imitation in writing, supposedly has a pedigree back to at least Ben Franklin and frees kids to learn how to write by taking the “What to write about?” question off the table.

There is a very explicit technique for doing this—it is detailed at writing-edu.com. (Click on Newletters on the right, then click on the article “Writing Without Tears.”) The article disucsses thoroughly, with an example, how to break each sentence down into three key words, then use them to rewrite the paragraph. This could be done paragraph by paragraph with any material your son is reading. You could do this yourself as a supplement to whatever his tutor is having him read. You wouldn’t need any other special materials.

The key word concept is the basis of the writing program offered on the site by the Institute for Excellence in Writing. Once the key word concept is down, the program moves into structuring other types of expository writing and style. I really like this program, but many people find the format a bit difficult. The main product is a series of videotapes with notebooks summarizing the main points on how to teach writing. The tapes are very engaging for both children and adults as the presenter, Andrew Pudewa is very charming and amusing. (Clips of the videos can be seen through the website.) There is no program per se—you use the techniques with any reading materials at hand—English, science, history, or on any subject the child may have an interest in.

I have found school instruction generally to be sadly lacking in teaching children how to structure writing—there is way too much of a tendency to have kids “journal” and think that has taught them the writing skills they need.

I am asking Nancy to contribute to this discussion because she is the only other poster on this board who appears to be familiar with both IEW and Step-Up to Writing. Step comes highly recommended here on this board for teaching writing, but I am not familiar with it other than what I have read on the website (stepuptowriting.com). My impression is that is goes over much of the same ground as IEW for structuring, but perhaps IEW is more emphatic on the point that you can use its program on any topic the child is studying, for example history or science. I also think that IEW’s key word concept for beginnng the teaching of writing is incredibly valuable for easing in the very reluctant writers (particularly boys!) and am not sure that Step has anything comparable.

Step up to Writing seems to me to be more of a resource book for teachers who already know how to teach writing. It has some great ideas, but it would be hard for a parent to pull together a writing program from it.

IEW is easier for a parent to use, and Andrew Pudewa is usually rather appealing to boys.

There’s another program available called WriteShop (http://writeshop.homestead.com/) I haven’t looked at, which is supposed to be similar to IEW but laid out in step-by-step lesson plans for the parent.

Nancy

I looked at Writeshop’s information on the web a while ago when I first read about it. As a parent of a reluctant writer, I found their lessons pretty intimidating—the first three lessons are describe an object, describe a pet, and describe a person. It appears to give prompts and whatnot to elicit responses from the student but I wouldn’t have gotten to first base if I started off with my son by asking him to describe, for example, a pencil. On the other hand, he had no problem getting down to writing using Andrew Pudewa’s student intensive video workshop, which starts with practicing the key word concept through rewriting a couple of paragraphs.

I didn’t realize that about WriteShop.

IEW would be a much better choice for starting a reluctant writer, then. The way IEW starts with that key word outline is hard to beat! It’s gentle, useful, and all kids can be successful with it right away.

Step Up to Writing has a keyword outline that is very similar to IEW’s. The difference is that Step doesn’t tell you to start with that exercise. It just provides it as a tool you can use. That’s why I think Step is better suited to someone who already knows how to teach writing and just needs a resource book of ideas to use.

Some parents move from IEW into WriteShop after a couple of years, for the convenience of the daily lesson plans.

Nancy

I appreciate your insights into Step Up. I’d heard so much about it on this board that I kept feeling I was missing out on something I should try as a parent. I didn’t much like the idea, though, of spending the money for something that ultimately would not be very useful. You’ve validated my hesitancy. I do feel I got my money’s worth from the IEW student intensive workshop tapes.

Hi all,

Great comments and insights from everybody!!

The comment about getting all the pieces together before growth can occur really made a lot of sense. My son also has speech/language difficulties that he has been getting speech therapy for since age of three. One of the particular difficulties is that he has difficulty in describing things. If you ask him what has leaves, bark and is brown he can tell you a tree but if you ask him to describe 3 things about a tree he has great difficulty. So it would make sense then that he would have difficulty describing or putting into writing his thoughts … . think we need to talk to the speech therapist about working on this more intently.

Will also talk to his tutor about the IEW program. I think the thought of using key words and rewriting something someone has already described would be a fantastic way of getting him to start writing and thinking descriptively.

I was glad also that my feeling that his writing would improve if it were more closely tied to his reading/spelling instruction also made sense with you all.

Thanks so much everyone for your help and great advice!!!

Thanks,

Pam

I agree that writing and reading definitely tie together.

There are two issues about writing: mechanics and content.

You have plenty of good advice above about content; go for it.

If you’d also like some help with the mechanics of handwriting — still a useful skill, especially in math and on tests, whether you can type or not — I have saved several of my old posts on what to do to make writing (as a physical skill) smoother, easier, faster, more readable, and all-around less of a trial.

Several of these methods are similar to what is done in OG, but I tend to be more direct and go farther.

Just email me if you are interested.

PLEASE email me what you have about writing mechanics! I need all the help I can get! Thanks!

Pam,

You wrote “if you ask him to describe 3 things about a tree he has great difficulty.” This would indicate to me a problem with visualization. Lindamood Bell’s Verbalization/Visualization program is designed to address this. Many SLPs are trained in this. You might ask her whether she can use these techniques with him.

Many parents also buy the book themselves and do it. Another program you can order over the internet that provides all the equipment you need and scripted lessons is called Idea Chain. It is supposed to be much easier to use for the parent, but of course it costs more than it would if you just bought the LMB V/V book—itself not so cheap.

Three at home games you can play that help with categorization and descriptive characteristics: Tribond (go for the junior version given where your son is), Scattergories (also junior), and Mystery Garden. (Look at it first, he may be told old for it—it’s sort of like the old twenty questions, but has pictures and is played as a game.)

Another suggestion:
this worked so effectively for my 12 year old son who has a language based learning disablity which greatly impacted language arts - reading and writing. At the begining of sixth grade, in one month, I taught him to keyboard. After that, all written work was to be completed on the computer. That removed many of the barriers that were present for my son and the quality of his written work greatly increased.
We used prewriting strategies (brainstorming, graphic organizing) right on the computer. He learned to use larger vocabulary because he used his talking spell checker and began to be able to self-correct spelling errors more easily because he could “picture” correct spelling using a legible font. Previously, his written work reflected his reading level and comfort level for spelling which was well below grade level.
He found it much easier to revise his work using word processing tools - what child or adult like to erase, copy over their work? We also found that the use of text - to -speech software so that he could listen to what he had written helped him to recognize grammatical and spelling errors. When he would proof read outloud to himself, he would often read what he thought it should say and not what he had actually typed. So the auditory feedback was also very effective for him.
We also use the Readability Statistics that are built into MicroSoft Word so that he is motivated to persist in revising and editing his work. He tries to improve his grade level statistic to his current grade level.
An excellent article to read is “How Computers Change the Writing Process for Students with Learning Disabilities” at Richard Wanderman’s website LDResources.org.