writing

I’m working on writing with my son. Particularly creative writing which he has great difficulty with (but I’m starting him with some exciting topics so that’s helping! ;-). His spelling is terrible as well. In fact, we went over “her” last night because he continues to spell it as “hir”!!!! (That orthographic pattern recognition problem again!).

I’ve been trying to work with him a lot on “visualizing” letters. Like Seeing Stars in the hope this will help. Unfortunately, he absolutely refuses to air write, table write, etc… so I have him write the words multiple times on a white board. Afterward I take the board away, tell him to close his eyes and visualize the word. Then I have him tell me the position of various letters or spell it backward.

Your son may be ready for Sequential Spelling.

My son has the same problem with orthographic pattern recognition. I think I will try Sequential Spelling in the summer. Her as hir—well at least that is phonetically correct. We had clin for clean. If you ask him, he will at least get a possible pattern but you can’t do that while writing.

We haven’t even tried creative writing. I have a feeling it will go really poorly—he is Mr. Concrete.

My son will air write and table write. He can manipulate the letters but don’t see any of it impacting his spelling.

Beth

Beth,

It is hard when kids don’t want to stand out, but we’ve found typing to be the best thing for my son. He *can* write, but it is effortful, mentally and physically, and interferes with his ability to think about what he is writing. Many spelling and grammar issues can be dealt with by using word prediction software such as Co:Writer. Good old MS Word works well also. It underlines spelling errors in red and grammar error in green and offers corrections. My son grumbles when Word tells him he’s made a mistake, but he does make the corrections and has even learned some rules of punctuation and sentence construction as a result. He would never see these errors if they were not visually highlighted for him. In a way, it puts him in charge rather than me or a teacher, and, as he is 12 years old and beginning to look, sound and act like a teen-ager, that is a good thing. I don’t know if your son is a visual learner, but if he is, here is weird spelling technique that works: Have him look at a spelling word for twenty second, then close his eyes, visualize the word, and spell it backwards. Multi-syllable words can have each syllable written in a different color to enhance the visual impact. I don’t do very well with this approach, but my son is amazing at it. He tends to be able to spell for tests (pure memory) but to make easy spelling errors when writing a paragraph. He still can’t tell the difference between to, too and two when he writes, for example.

Andrea

Andrea

My son has not kept up his typing skills so when they put him on the computer with co-writer (which was agreed upon last year when he couldn’t write a paragraph even), he actually did worse than by hand. I know that writing takes a lot of effort for my son. He has had FCAT (our high stakes testing) practice in the evening and each story/selection has two writing sections. I read the selection with him (it is a bit above his reading level so working on reading this way) and he reads the multiple choice questions and answers them. Then I leave him to answer the short answer ones. It takes forever and he is tired when he is done, although the answers are really pretty good (if you ignore the fact that he only spells only 1 in 10 words correctly and there are no capitals or periods to speak of).

My gut says he needs to move to keyboarding, at least at home. But I am not sure how to manage that since there certainly aren’t enough written assignments for home to keep his skills up. Does your son use keyboarding at school?
Do you make him practice at home? I did at the beginning of the year but that fell by the wayside. He thought it was soooo boring and when he turned out to be able write successfully by hand at school, I stopped fighting.

How can I turn my kid into one like yours? In other words, how did you do it?

Beth

Hi Beth,

It has taken a year and a half of keyboarding 20 minutes 3 times a week with the SPED teacher or a SPED aide for my older one (12) to FINALLY get to the point where keyboarding “feels” easier to him than writing (actually printing… they never were able to teach him cursive) Until HE reached the point where keyboarding felt easier than doing it by hand, we just couldn’t get him to even try it outside of his mandatory sessions. The Asisstive Tech person had told us that for most kids they need to be typing at least 6WPM before they make this leap. For Robbie, it was around 10WPM that the lightbulb clicked.

He now has a laptop that he uses for long written assignments at school, and he works on a desk top model at home. We have found that he objects to lugging it back and forth, so instead, he just puts anything he’s working on onto a floppy disk to bring back and forth.

All I can say is taht I understand how hard it is to MAKE them keep at it, but for us, it was well worth the effort. The built-in editting tools make it so much easier to fix what he’s written. If he were asked to copy something over by hand to edit or neaten it up, it was immediate shut-down time. Now, All I have to do is mark up a print-out for him, and he willingly goes back and makes the changes. (Now, if we can get him to the point that he can fix the mistakes himself…)

Karen

Beth,

My son’s handwriting problems were so severe that I got him an alphasmart in first grade and he started using it for virtually all homework that required writing, even if it was only a word or two. He still hand wrote at school and we still worked on his handwriting, but we needed some way to ease the physical and mental burden that a pencil imposed on him. We did not insist that he type with proper form, because we just wanted him to feel comfortable with the keyboard. At first it took a long time for him to type, longer even than it would to hand write. This was partly because of his distractability and partly because he had motor issues that made it difficult form him to use his fingers separately. We introduced typing skills at home by using a program called Read, Write and Type, which he thought was fun. It might be a little babyish for your son, though. My son viewed it as playing a computer game rather than more work. (He was easier to fool then.) At school, we wrote typing goals into his IEP and the school OT worked with him on this. She used Type to Learn, which my son disliked, but which did help him. He now has pretty good form and types well. He is able to see that it is more efficient for him to type and so he is willing to do it. He does use a laptop at school now for note-taking and for essay tests. He does most of his homework on the laptop, except for math. For us, at least, it has been a matter of giving my son constant exposure to typing, so that he could get better at it and see the benefits of it. I also think that it is important to make the school accountable for typing goals. I really think ALL kids would benefit from learning how to type. My oldest does not have any LDs but uses his laptop for most assignments because it is easier and neater. Does your son receive OT? I wonder if he is having motor skills difficulties that make typing hard for him. That is something OT could address.

Andrea

My 6th grade LD son just uses our home computers to do research projects, essays, etc., in fact at middle school everybody is supposed to type everything anyway; BUT I can’t imagine how he could take notes, do endless worksheets, and keep up his single-subject notebooks for every teacher using a laptop at school. Yes, let your 4th grade son do homework on a computer, but keep up the writing skills by hand(my son only knows how to print), you can’t survive without them. My son improved greatly over 4-6th grade without OT, etc. I bribed him each summer to do Type to Learn and it helped. I still offer to have him dictate to me while I type if he’s tired.

My 4th grade son is very bright and does well at school but during creative writing in class has terrible spelling, and forgets commas, quotation marks etc. I think we are expecting too much of these young kids! He too types all his homework assignments(he loves WORD and changing fonts, etc.) and uses spell and grammar check all the time. I have found my 4th grader’s teacher is much more strict about spelling, etc. than any of the middle school teachers! For the long essay part of our high stakes testing they don’t take off for spelling.

I agree completely that you don’t want to let the school off the hook for giving the kids functional skills for writing by hand if at all possible. My 6th grader still does all short answers and work sheets by hand. He can print quite neatly, just very slowly.

He is encouraged to take notes himself, but realistically, his note-taking skills, either by hand or with a lap top are not adequate for the amount of material that they must absorb in middle school. His SPED teacher makes sure that he gets copies of the notes he needs in all classes, either from the general ed teacher or directly from her. She also gives him a study guide before tests.

Hopefully his note-taking skills will improve with time, but for now, he still needs these supports.

Karen

As an assistive technology consultant, I just wanted to add a few comments. Read Richard Wanderman’s article “How Computers Change the Writing Process for People with Learning Issues” at his website www.ldresources.org.

Also, it is possible to teach keyboarding skills quickly using an alphabetic approach such as the one recommended using Diane Hanbury-King’s book “Keyboarding skills.” I have used this approach and taught students in two weeks and they have achieved a minimum of 8 to 10 WPM.

Another good option is to use a phonetic spell-checker. They cost about $20.00 and are great tools for kids. They will be willing to take the risk of “more advanced” vocabulary because of the readily available spelling tool. There are talking spell checkers for students with difficulty with reading.
Just a few other options that help accommodate for the written language issues.

In our middle school, many of the teachers give all the students copies of notes they need as a matter of course; note-taking is a skill that needs to be learned over time…I was happy to see that it’s not an issue in any of my 6th grader’s classes except for tech-ed, where he has to take notes all in capital letters in a certain way and they are graded on their notebooks.

Egad! I hope they don’t try to do that to Robbie! He has had Academic Support in all the “arts” periods for the first 2 quarters, and was dying to do tech ed. The SPED teacher and we discussed it, and as he had been on the honor role for both of the first 2 quarters, we decided that it was worth letting him try and see if he could get by with 2 less AS periods per week as a “reward” for his efforts. He’s only had Tech Ed for two weeks now. I’d hate to see his two “fun” periods of the week turned into torture sessions!

Karen

Hi Karen,

I’d like to add that we consider the Assistive Tech assessment we had done for my son to be one of our better educational investments. Having someone who really understood the ins and outs of specific LD’s AND knew what hardware, software and low tech options might work best for him was really helpful. The place where we went for our eval (Children’s Hospital in Boston) also had an OT right there to help assess him. (he’s got some physical issues that needed to be taken into consideration too) They let him try different software, keyboard arrangements and seating postions right there, so they got his direct input as well.

We left with a comprehensive assessment of where he stood, what options were most likely to work well for him, and guidance for the school system in working with him. It was something that I didn’t even know existed until our advocate suggested it. I was very impressed with how thorough they were, and how it has helped us plan since then.

Karen

I agree we expect too much. Writing is an output issue and if it is a skill that comes later does it really matter as long as it comes?

It does not affect what they learn as reading does.

I was really stressed about my third graders writing issue because the school was stressed about it. The kid has come so far in everything else moving several years in reading in math in one year with appropriate intervention.

I know writing is important but we need a little perspective especially with young kids.

I was at my doctor for my son’s check up. She knows the difficulties he has had at school. I told her everything was going really good except writing. She looked up and said, “That’s great, he is only in third. I wouldn’t worry about the writing yet.”

He does get OT and has since K. We may be in a difficult position in terms of making the school accountable for typing goals though. He even has learned cursive, post IM. The OT kept him on one more year with the goal of helping him master the transition to cursive. He also still has problems copying off the board, but his teacher doesn’t require much of that.

Is there any sort of evaluation that could result in typing instruction?

Last year when they experimented with technology with him is probably when I should have insisted on having his IEP revised and typing goals built into it. I am afraid he is not bad enough now.

We used Read, Write, and Type last summer. He liked it a lot. He even did it twice. Post IM, I really don’t think he has motor problems that are making it difficult to type. I think it is more that he got better at handwriting and now doesn’t want to do it.

Beth

Let me clarify that the keyboarding instruction is done without specialized software and only takes about 10 to 15 minutes per day. It is not a long dragged out process.
Karen

I can see maybe I expected too much too soon. He did two rounds of Read, Write, and Type last summer and wasn’t half bad it at the end of summer. I think he was doing about 10-12 wpm on their tests (which is very different than writing yourself). Ironically, if we had not done IM, I think he would have kept it up. But when his handwriting became less of an issue, the typing level wasn’t good enough to FEEL easier, as you put it.

I can see I am just going to have to keep up the typing, in some form or another, until it is easier.

My 7th grade daughter learned to type in sixth grade. While not LD, she too has some small motor issues and never liked to write. Typing has made a tremendous difference to her. She does lots more writing for fun—newsletters about our dog, for example. I tried using her as an example but Nathan did not buy it. He told me he wasn’t in middle school yet. Sigh.

Beth

My son came home the other day to report his friend had his own email account. He thought this was soooo cool. I thought that perhaps I should get him emailing his cousin whom he adores.

Also, instant messaging requires that you type pretty fast.

While Robbie has motor issues too, he has printed neatly enough since 2nd grade that they kicked him off OT at that time. Their position was that all the OT tests they use are untimed, so it didn’t matter that it took him between 4 and 10 times as long as the average kid to do a small motor task, and since he knew how to construct a bow in a shoe lace, it didn’t matter that he couldn’t make it tight enough to keep the shoes on his feet.

The private OT eval we had done said he DID need OT, but you have to choose your battles. He also needed other out-of-school therapies, and we thought that adding private OT was too much for him. (to say nothing of our pocketbooks) We might have been able to force them into providing in-school OT, but it would have been too little, by a person who had already said she didn’t think he needed it, and whom he HATED.

He also saw no purpose to keyboarding, since for more than the first year, he didn’t reach a functional level. He hated that too, but because we knew it would be SO important at the middle school level and above, we persisted. It was the one intervention that we forced down his throat, whether he wanted to do it or not. We bribed him with a Gameboy Advance, and at times paid him to do it.

In his case, the motor issues are only a small part of his writing difficulties. We needed him keyboarding fluently and automatically, so that his whole brain could turn to the difficult problem of written expression.

Since becoming fluent with the keyboard, his writing has advanced light years almost overnight. He has gone from the end of last year where EVERY paper in school was scribed for him, and pulled out of his brain piece by piece by the SPED teacher or an aide, to this year where he’s composing 3 paragraph essays pretty independently. (still needs a lot of editing help, but the THOUGHTS are making their way to the paper) His IEP goal is to have him writing 5 paragraph grade level essays by the end of the year… We’ll see! But I KNOW he wouldn’t be even to get close to that goal without the keyboarding skills he’s gained over the past 2 years.

Karen

While we didn’t have anyone available to teach my son using that method. (I’ve heard about it, and it makes a HUGE amount of sense) Even using the more standard programs, It seemed more important to keep my son doing it for short periods regulalry than anything else. As I mentioned, his IEP called for keyboarding 20 minutes 3x per week. But I know that that 20 minutes included getting to the room, turning the computer on and off, etc. So I’m sure his actual typing time at each sitting was no more that 15 minutes, maybe less.

In my son’s case, he needed to be closely supervised, because he doesn’t use his right hand for ANYTHING unless he is constantly reminded. One of the reasons for the Assistive Tech eval was to decide whether we should even be trying to teach him to keyboard with both hands, or go to a one-handed program. They suggested giving the two handed approach a good long trial before giving up on it. I’m glad we did, because he HAS learned to keyboard 2 handed, and I think it has helped him to use that hand more in other tasks as well.

Karen

Beth,
Actually, being concrete is not a hinderance to creative writing. In the poetry classes I took in college we were always told to write our poetry concretely.

For my son creative writing is extremely difficult. He prefers science books and informational videos to fiction.

The first time he did this he sat for quite awhile unable to come up with any ideas. What I did was sit next to him for a bit and try to brain storm ideas with him. I figured he’d prefer adventure and action so I said, “How about your cat goes on an adventure?…Where do you think he would go?…What might happen?” I did have to help stimulate creative thought. I also got him a notebook and we’re going to save all his stories in it. He’s very proud of this and wants to write more.

Of course his second story was about his sister’s dog’s adventure and he’d like to do one on his turtle and then maybe the snails that live next to the porch…

We went to Dragon Speak Naturally last summer. It worked better than I imagined. I trained it for my voice so I could teach my daughter. I was worried that she wouldn’t be able to read the training passages. We had to stop and rehearse phrases, I whispered in her ear a few times. It was a tough 2 sessions but she got the hang of correcting the machine very quickly, the word/spelling prediction is very good. She dictates right into Word. She was dictating emails within a week! this is summer after grade 5.

I have also tried Via Voice for the Macintosh (after Dragon as her school is all Mac) and we gave up. Too tough to train, too tough to correct, too many errors. UGH. 159.99 and frustrating as heck.

There was a great article in Wired about the origins of Dragon Speak Naturally-its the only one that has years of linguistic algorhythms behind it. It used to cost $$$’s but in the bursting of the tech finance bubble it was bought out for a song. My DNS copy for Windows XP cost 49.99.

It is not for everyone butfor us it has gone a long way to taking Mom off dication and allowing her to work toward independence.

Ha! Sounds like my younger one. All through 2nd and 3rd grade, he wrote story after story about our hamster’s adventures. I’ll tell you, that was one busy hamster. He worked as a secret agent, (code name Double O Chewy) an astronaut fighting aliens and several other exciting professions.

Karen

Glad it worked for you. Your daughter must have exceptionally clear, fluent speech for a child. My son had neither the fluency, (nor the ability to organize his thoughts for verbal output) the be able to master Dragon. I used it for several months after a severe injury, and while it was better than typing with one, non-dominant hand, it was only a LITTLE better.

I’ve talked to many parents about Dragon (and other voice recognition software) and quite frankly, you are the first I’ve heard who has found it to be a really useful tool.

Karen

I think that getting the keyboarding down probably allowed Robbie to express what he already knew about writing. We saw some of the same thing last fall with Nathan. In third grade, noone could successfully get him to write a simple paragraph, despite the fact that it was a goal on his IEP. That is when I suggested technology and they tried co-writer with him. He did better than by hand but his lack of keyboarding was problematic.

We did IM over the summer and in fall his fourth grade teacher showed me and the resource teacher what Nathan had written. Both of our jaws dropped. It lacked punctuation and correct spelling but it was a page and a half long and made sense. Before we could only get him to write a couple sentences before he just collasped. It was like he had understood what he had been taught but the motor issues just got in the way.

You have made clear to me that we just need to keep plugging. Nathan’s better handwriting, post IM, has made typing less attractive. Yet, I see that he can’t seem to attend to punctuation ect while writing. I also agree that rewriting will be much less of an issue if we have it on disk. This year there has been little of that because the entire focus of fourth grade is on the dreaded FCATs. There is a lot of writing involved but there is no opportunity to rewrite so that skill has not been taught at all. The later is bad but I know Nathan would not have not had as good of writing instruction as he has had without the FCAT writing test. We have the best writing teacher—we thought she would be great when at his IEP meeting last year she didn’t think his practically nonexistent writing was so bad. She said “I have taught worse!!” She even taught his resource teacher how to teach writing.

I am glad to hear Robbie is doing so well with his writing.

Beth

Has Nathan had an assistive technology evaluation? That could result in typing instruction, if he needs it in order to make use of the technology like Co:Writer that the school already has made available to him.

Andrea

I had heard that the reading passages were difficult. But there was an easier reading level passage. She read exerpts of Treasure Island.
She has no speech problems, is verbal and it was the summer after grade 5. It woudld be difficult with the given reading passages with a very young child. After the first reading the accuracy was frustrating but after the second (she only did two) it was pretty good. She picked up the correcting very easily. Highlight the paassage say “correct’ and the program comes up with possible soluitions. She had to spell out the first 4 or 5 corrections -I was there monitoring- and it got better quite fast. She did learn to speak slowly but so did I . you can see the progress on the screen and you slow down to match it.

but Via Voice never got better. It was awkward to correct -just a real pain that never improved. Even I had difficulty with ViaVoice, never mind a kid.

As I said, I’m familiar with the program because I’ve used it myself. Robbie’s speech is clear, but he has a lot of intrusions and repetitions. He had no problem with the reading level, but then he read Treasure Island in 2nd grade. (reading isn’t usually an issue for NLD kids) He’d have had the same problems if the readings had been Cat in the Hat.

He was a little younger than your daughter… it was mid year in 4th grade, and that may have been part of the problem. His voice might just not have been mature enough. He was never able to get ANYTHING intelligible enough out of it to be worth editing, in spite of spending close to 20 hours “training” it. (he can be very single minded at times)

But most of my negative impressions were based on my own use. I found that you had to really know what you wanted to say before you started to say it, something that my son isn’t good at even now, in 6th grade. I found the composition AND editing process much more cumbersome than keyboarding, which I do with virtually no conscious thought. I feel like the words just flow out my finger tips. That is the level of fluency that I’d like Robbie to eventually achieve.

The other thing I didn’t like was that it was useless in the presence of ANY background noise. So I could only use it in the absolutely quiet house, with no one home. If I had a cold and sniffled, it tried to turn THAT into text. I don’t think it’s a tool that has a lot of application in varied life-situations.

If your daughter was past 5th grade when you started with Dragon, can I ask why you chose that over keyboarding? I CAN see it as an excellent option for someone with a physical disability that makes keyboarding impossible. But it’s hard for me to imagine a situation where it would be more functional for an able bodied person than good keyboarding skills.

For 4th and 5th grade, we scribed for him on any “long” (more than a sentence) written assignment, and kept keyboarding as a completely separate task than “writing”. I scribed for him at home on the computer, and the teacher or an aide did it for him at school by hand. At that stage, he really wasn’t writing anything of any length, and he wrote almost nothing without adult input and supervision anyway. So it wasn’t that big a burden for the adults. By the beginning of 6th grade, he was typing independently, and doing all his own work.

Karen

I totally agree, go for it. My son’s typing improved with instant messenger.. He is now a 9th grader and has a big list of instant messenger friends. Last night he used it to get clarification on directions for a letter homework assignment. He quickly IM’d about 11 students asking “Do you have Mr T.?” and got three yes replies. Within a few minutes he knew exactly what he needed to know.
As a side note if he had used his laptap to record the instructions instead of a piece of paper he would have had the directions on his own.

Helen

Get him a children’s dictionary I have both my 1st and 2 graders using it and it helps them—I make them look it up on their own

My daughter dictates easily and fluently-always has. The difference in her 3rd grade work written and dictated was phenomenal. Her written work was well below grade level and her dicated work several grade levels above in terms of vocab, sentence structure and complexity of thought. The only way we could get her to write anything in 3rd or 4th grade was to let her verbalize it first. By fourth grade, on an easy assignment we could write down the keywords of what she had said and she would be able to remember enough of what she had verbalized to write some of it. Language, for my daughter, is mostly easily accessed by verbal processing.

BTW-I think I was inspired by a sister-in-law’s busy legal office where almost all of the written work is done by dictation, even for professional typist/secretaries/paralegals.

My writing never improved and at age 25 I finally learned to use computers. It took another seven years but I graduated in the top 10% of my class with a BA in psychology and a special ed minor. Maybe if I’d had access to computers sooner, I wouldn’t have dropped out of my first year of high school.