My son has been labeled with a written expression disability since he was in the second grade. He is now in the seventh grade. I have seen a very small amount of improvement in the area of writing. What is frustrating to me is the lack of homework I see him do. He always completes his assignment given to him but he rarely does more than 30 minutes of work a night.
Early in the school year he experienced problems in math. We were always told he might have some difficulity in this area as he got older. Nothing showed up until this year. To tell you the truth I think he was given easy stuff to do and never challenged at all until this year. Now he received an F in Math in the fall. On the winter report card he raised his F to a C. (He has an excellent teacher and also worked for an extra 15 minutes a night as well as attended free after school tutor program in Math.) With a little bit of hitting the books he now has a B average. I have been assured that this is 7th grade Math. From the looks of the material I believe it is on grade level. Now, after all this you wonder why am I posting anything here? The reason is that no one until now pushed him to do better. I felt he just got by with out any type of challenge because he had a LD label. Now my next step is to working on his writing. If he is in the 7th grade what should his written expression level be? Tonight he wrote a quick 6 sentence story for me on the 2nd grade level. ( I used the spell check function to give me the readability level. ) I would think his writing should be higher. Maybe not at 7th grade level. Do you think this spell/language check aspect of the Microsoft Office program is a good way of seeing what his level is? I think if he get direct instruction from me as well as being shown how to improve he could raise his writng ability with perserverance and work. What do you think? I’m new here and I am not going to just let him float by with a label.
Re: improving written expression
Grade levels assigned to a piece of writing asses the instructional level for teaching reading — what grade level of child would be just able to read that piece with some teacher assistance. It would be absolutely normal for a student’s writing to be lower than his independent reading level (output almost always falls behind input) and definitely lower than his instructional level. Just guessing and thinking about students’ writing, I would think that a Grade 7 student who wrote well would produce material that would rate Grade 3 or 4 in reading level. So your son is maybe a little lower than would be best, but not that low.
Far more important are the questions that Pattim asks — is he using adverbs and adjectives and other descriptive words? Is he using specific words rather than vague generalities? Is he using compound sentences? Is he using conjunctions other than “and”? Is he using complex sentences with subordinating conjunctions? All of these would demonstrate complex thought patterns and lead to richness of written work.
The other question that concerns me is length of output. Six sentences is not much for a “story” — a bare description, maybe. Now, you have to be careful; grading by length and pounds of paper just encourages rambling and repetition. But you can ask questions, especially “why?” and ” what did …. look like?” “feel like” etc., to get some more detail into the writing.
Re: improving written expression
Sandy,
I am probably the last person to judge writing since I am foreign, but I will share with you the objective my son has to measure his improvement in writing.
My son is in 5th grade and the goal on his IEP is that he will write independently a 5 paragraph story with at least 135 “mature” words (these are defined as a vocabulary words above 2nd grade level vocabulary) and an average sentence length of 13 (?- I believe) words. This I believe would be equivalent to ~4/5th grade level writing (he started last fall below 3rd grade level).
Question on TOWL
Patti,
What exactly does this test measure? My guess is that it looks at word usage, grammar, and syntax. Two years apart my ds has scored 120 on this test but he still has enormous difficulty organizing his thoughts for papers for school. Am I right that the TOWL does not necessarily measure the sort of logical organization needed, for example, for a persuasive essay?
Thanks for any light you can shed on this.
Re: Question on TOWL
You have to look at the test for the independent essay. I have been dealing the problem for years—and finally I know my daughter can pass all grammar and sentence tests and can’t write an essay unless she has constant, trained one-on-one help and maybe not then. My daughter can’t organize or take perspective and can’t write much past the 3rd grade level on expository writing. She is an excellent creative writer and reads at college level. It has been suggested that she use a laptop with inspiration and co-writer software.
If you look at the california state standards for english, they are a good list of what is expected in this area for each grade level. There is even a book of objectives and goals based on each standard. When I look at it, my daughter is at the 3rd grade standard for expository writing—but she gets a 98% o the SAT 9 tests.
good luck
you two are talking about executive functinoning...organizat
This is different than just having a hard time writing. I am talking about a kid who has langauge differences, The TOWL also looks at how a kid organizes his writing but what I am looking more for is syntax, word usage, semenatics, punctuation, etc..
Your kiddo’s probably have a lot to say it is just hard to organize the thoughts on paper. That is where graphic organizers come in handy and fool proof templates and outlines.
It is how their brain works, in other words…if your kid doesn’t have a language based writing problem then it is more related to executive functioning organizational issues/ADD.
Has he had a speech and language evaluation recently? I would strongly suggest he have the TOWL the Test of Written Language to see what he can do and where the holes are. What are his sentences like? How long are they? Does he use conjuctions adverbs, adjectives? If you give me more information I can be of more help.