Hello—I have been working with a 4th-grade child on reading comprehension for a while, and he’s doing nicely. He was recently evaluated by an audiologist and found to have a little difficulty with sounds in his left ear (processing, not hearing). He has tremendous difficulty writing—mainly generating ideas (not even a word that would relate to a topic, like Halloween); his listening comp is ok but not great. He has a hard time focusing in a busy classroom. Would the more advanced levels of FFW benefit him? I know the earliest one is great for phonolgical processing. This child’s phonological processing and nonsense word decoding are good; symbol and concept imagery are weak (working on that….). Thanks in advance.
Re: How is FFW for language comprehension/writing?
Thanks, Patti! He is being treated for ADD as well. I will check out those books; I use Diana Hanbury King’s first book with him, along with some of Basic Writing Skills. It’s always great to hear of something new that is decent.
Re: How is FFW for language comprehension/writing?
It’s “When they can’t write” by Charlotte Morgan (www.yorkpress.com) — and I agree with Patti. It doesn’t sound like the processing issues are severe enough to be what’s keeping him from working with the language; for most kiddos it’s a different issue. Whether or not you did more FFW, he’d almost certainly *also* have to learn to organize that thinking.
Re: How is FFW for language comprehension/writing?
Visualizing and Verbalizing is what I’d use first. First you get the oral language comprehension underway, then add reading comprehension, and then you add in written expression. I think what we often do wrong is expect the child to do writing that is beyond his language comprehension, and it just doesn’t work. The other good writing program I have heard that LD teachers like is Step Up to Writing by Sopris West. But I have seen it and there is a LOT of material for the teacher to sift through to learn how to use it. I’d like to take a look at Diana Hanbury King’s revised writing skills books.
Janis
Re: How is FFW for language comprehension/writing?
Thanks, Janis! I’ve actually been doing v/v for a while and he has such trouble constructing images. However, he is reading more on his own now, and even told his mom he liked reading. I almost fell off my chair. The writing is a monster, though.
I do mostly read the sentence (s) to him. I believe this difficulty visualizing is really at the heart of his trouble with language. His father even told me that the child has lesions on his brain in the area that controls mental imaging (dad’s0 a psychiatrist). Funny thing is, though, that the child can draw pictures to match the words I say fairly easily. So do you think it might be an expressive language-integration issue? Sometimes he gets so stuck he can’t even spontaneously tell me if it’s hard to say what he’s picturing or hard to picture something. (He always says that it’s hard to picture when I ask.) I’d love to know your thoughts.
Executive Functioning/Organizational issues. I always incorporate using writing when working on spoken langauge as I feel it just helps these kids so much to see the words on the page and it is just another multi=modality approach to use to help them with their language organization. Many SLP’s will only work on the spoken language. I don’t think that using FFW will help this kid with written language. I think a program like Project Read’s Writing program or If they can’t write by Charlotte Morgan or Dr. Spivey’s Strengthening a students writing through focus would be the way to go with these kids.
They need to be taught how to organize their thoughts, through graphic organizers, teach them explicitly through modelling on what words to use, how to compose sentences using a noun and verb and expanders such as adjectives etc… Also the child could have ADHD that can be treated through medication if you aren’t making progress.