teaching writing

I would suggest that the teacher talk with the SLP so the SLP can work on these sentences with the child.

Janis

[quote=”breann”]How would you teach a lst grader to write a sentence incorporating a weekly spelling word? The regular classroom teacher is at her wits end in getting him to perform this weekly task. I suspect language is a huge part of the problem as he in language therapy. He seems not to be able to orally come up with a sentence to begin with. What would be some suggestions to give her in formulating the sentence?[/quote]

I’m not crazy about the task but if he has to do it…. Does the teacher recognize that this child has language issues?

If he can’t generate the sentence orally, then he deserves to be supported with thorough prompts. If the spelling word is dog, prompt him - I gave my dog a bone. Now can you say a sentence with the word dog in it? Who else might have given their dog a bone? “My grandfather gave his dog a bone?” Or what else might we have done with our dog? “I gave my dog a bath. Or I gave my dog a pat on the head.

With such prompts, the child should be able to generate a oral sentence on his own. Writing it down may be another matter.

Good luck.

Perhaps a fill in the blank task would work. Now how to get the teacher to implement this is another story, but perhaps you could set this up. I would imagine that either a. This is in the “curriculum” and the teacher has not thought about it. b. This is to be able to use the word in context.
So a fill in the word task would be the spirit of b. in any case.
For example, to use the last example, say 3 words were stone, bone, and cone.
Then the fill in the blanks could be “I eat an ice cream ____”; I give the dog a ______”, There was a big ____ on the path.

However, gettign the teacher to do that and so on is another story.
but there may be another way to get the spelling done without really having the expressive language issues.

—des

Start where he is. Give him fill-in blank first. Then try splitting sentence into subject/predicate and letting him match. Then give him the subject and let him generate a predicate, then try the reverse. Also, play games like changing the subject word or predicate word, then adding descriptors, like an adj. just before the subject, etc.

I found this post over at teachers.net. I hope she doesn’t mind me posting it here without her perm.

Hi! I tried a new technique in my resource room which has
worked nicely. I thought I’d share it with you.

On Mondays, the children copy sentences containing their
new spelling words. When they copy, the use a green marker
for the first letter of the sentence, a yellow marker for a
capital that comes within the sentence, and a red marker
for the ending punctuation. On Tuesdays, they create their
own sentences using the same color-coding method. When they
took their language-arts benchmark test today, I let them
use their markers on the “editing” section. They did
significantly better than any class I’ve had in the past
years. Carol

Michelle AZ