Written Expression Concerns

My son was diagnosed with a LD in written expression at age 10. His reading was at grade level at that time, so was not a concern. At that point, we started him working with a tutor who specialized in working with LD kids of all sorts. She initially stressed teaching phonics, which had not been taught to him before, as our school district follows a whole-language approach. She also encouraged dictation, to get him thinking about writing, as he was clearly writing below his comprehension level because he didn’t know how to spell the words he wanted to use. She also worked with him extensively on handwriting skills and grammar rules.

My son is now in 8th grade, and working at grade level with no resource room help. He still does go to the same tutor twice a month. The level of help he needs now is much less, as he’s learned to compensate for his LD. He still has issues with spelling, but has learned how to use a small electronic dictionary (by Franklin) and spell check on his computer to compensate.

If you can help your daughter get her ideas out by acting as a scribe for her, that may help her in written expression. If you can encourage her to write even when she knows she can’t spell, that may also help. Learning how to keyboard and use spell check in an editing program on a computer are also valuable. These skills will become more useful later in her schooling.

The things we did helped my son because he was on or above grade level with verbal expression, but had issues with spelling and the actual act of writing. If your daughter also has problems with verbal expression, these suggestions may not help.

Good luck!

Thank you for your suggestions! My daughter has very strong verbal skills, scoring well above grade-level in this area, for which I am very grateful. I have been encouraging to write even though her spelling is awful and she totally forgets about punctuation! Her school uses Slingerland, so she has a strong phonics base, and we purchased an Alpha Smart this summer so she has develped the typing skills necesary to use that tool when handwriting becomes a chore. Now I’d like to move her into writing more, bringing in learning to write paragraphs, stories, etc. She receives almost no exposure to these skills at school. I’d like to try to make it “fun” for her, but am not clear on the direction to take. I have thought about purchasing the Franklin Dictionary to provide her with another tool, but haven’t researched it enough to know which one would be best for her.

Shay, who posts here frequently, uses Step Up to Writing for her high school kids. I haven’t used it but you might like to check it out on sopriswest.com.

I have used Institute for Excellence in Writing and like their approach very much. Check it out at writing-edu.com. A really good description of the beginning IEW approach using key words can be found in the article “Writing Without Tears” on the website. Click on “Newletters” in the left column of the homepage. Just using the information in the article you can give the method a try using a short age-appropriate passage to see (for free) is this is something that might work for your dd.

The Franklin dictionary does not need to be a big investment decision. For under $20 you can buy the Franklin Spelling Ace. You wouldn’t know it from the packaging, but it does more than just give the correct spelling of the word—it includes a dictionary and a thesaurus function that is especially handy to use for expressive writing purposes. The Spelling Ace should be sufficient for most purposes. Franklin has other ones, but I wouldn’t bother with any one without both a thesaurus and dictionary. The descriptions are often unuseful and you need to go to the product insert information—available at www.franklin.com—to actually find out what the device does and does not do. For my ds who needs auditory enforcement and help in pronouncing words, I recently bought the Franklin Language Master at Amazon for $110. It is an extremely well done and impressive product, but I would not have gone there without the prior experience with the Spelling Ace and the extremely good price—retail is around $200.

The way my son’s tutor made paragraph writing “fun” was to pick a topic that he was interested in. One example for him was fast, fancy cars. He wrote a description of the car he wanted to own. The other kind of fun writing I had him do was letters to relatives (the payoff is that he got mail in return).

The Franklin dictionary we got included a thesaurus and also some word games. It was $40 at Costco, and I’ve seen it for $45 at Target. The nice thing about it is if you type in something spelled incorrectly, it gives you a list of possibilities to pick from. This doesn’t always work if you’re way off base for the initial spelling, but it’s pretty good with deciphering phonetic attempts at spelling. I even got my younger daughter one for her own use, although she didn’t really need the spelling help. She gets lots of assignments that require writing down definitions, and the calculator sized dictionary allows her to bring her homework almost anywhere.

If they haven’t been exposed to the basics of putting together a paragraph at school, you could work on that with your daughter. If you can get 4 sentences, one with a main idea, and a final one with a conclusion, you’re doing great with a 10 yr old with a written expression LD. Then you can work up to multiparagraph descriptions. If she’s got good verbal skills, there’s lots you can do to help her write, but it will take time and effort. My son came home this week with a 94% on an English assignment. This is a huge improvement over what he was doing 3 years ago when he was your daughter’s age.

It’s really important to get her ideas for writing flowing, and not worry so much about the mechanics (punctuation, spelling). Then, after she has something down on paper, you can work with her on editing skills. And, to keep her confidence up (at least with my son, that was a real problem for while), remind her that even professional writers do lots and lots of editing.

Unfortunately, not all teachers have been trained in the area of how to teach students to write… I know… I’m one of them! So I have had to teach myself how to teach my middle school students how to write. I have done this by reading, doing research, consulting knowledgeable colleagues, etc.

My school district (in California) is currently using a wonderful language arts series by Holt. It’s a very comprehensive textbook/program that includes a Literature & Language Arts book, a Handbook (teaches conventions), and other support materials. This series walks teachers through, step by step, how to teach kids to write the various genres of writing that they must learn. It’s a wonderful program. The use of graphic organizers, the step by step approach, the examples given… all are very helpful. I have seen some real success with my LD students at the 7th grade level.

I hope that I am not dangling something that is impossible for you (or your teachers) to access. Try contacting the Holt, Rinehart, and Winston Publishing Company and ask them to send some samples to your child’s teacher (or to you…if they will!) Usually teachers and schools can preview materials for 30 days before having to either buy them or send them back.

I found that the big problem was the planning. My daughter had great verbal skills and could dictate at very high level but the executive skills for written were not there. We would talk over the needed paragraph(s). I would put keywords on a sticky which she used as a guide both for spelling and to jog her memory about what to write. I did a lot of graphic organizers -mind mapping, etc to help her plan. Inspiration is good software for this. www.graphic.org/ is a good site but there are many more; put “graphic organize” into google and you will see them.

Stick with it-teaching a kid to plan writing is a skill they will use all their life. Many kids don’t get it, ask any 4-6th grade teacher. Good luck

Thanks to all of you for the wonderful advice! I plan to implement much of what has been suggested. Please bear with me if I write for more guidance, I know this is important for her future, and I am far from a being a teacher!

Since her reading is okay, it doens’t sound like she needs a “talking” spellchecker. There are some tricks to getting the most out of them; the first letter or two are *critical.* (This means you can forget figuring out how to spell “once” from its phonetic spelling.)

And yes, remember… writing is a process that takes years and years to develop — for folks who are good with language even. Rowena wrote:
>
> Thanks to all of you for the wonderful advice! I plan to
> implement much of what has been suggested. Please bear with
> me if I write for more guidance, I know this is important for
> her future, and I am far from a being a teacher!