I have an 8th grader with dyslexia and ADD. She’s been in SPED for 5 years and also privately tutored outside of school for all that time. Her recent 3-year eval, show her reading is coming along nicely, some real improvement over the past 1 1/2 year. She is in keyboarding now and teacher says she is doing very well typing from copy with minimal errors. O-G tutor says she knows her stuff forward and backwards, all the spelling rules. If she has a long assignment, I allow her to scribe and she understands the material well and has plenty of good thoughts to put on paper. The problem is she has all the pieces but cannot put them together to produce written work. Her academic teachers English, SS, Science say she has extreme difficulty writing almost anything. She cannot get the words on the paper. When spelling in isolation, she does Ok, can apply the rules fairly consistently but she cannot carry it over to her wriiten work. Trying to pull everything together all at once to write becomes so much work, she easily becomes overwhelmed and cannot write anything. She can’t apply the spelling rules while writing and even she at times can’t read what she writes. I need some ideas for remediation of her written expression difficulties. We are going to try the speech recognition software to help circumvent the problem but this is not always practical. She can do this at home but it would be a lot more difficult to set up at school and besides that, I want them to provide remediation in this area. I’m looking for some specific ideas or programs we could try with her.
Re: Remediation, or proofreading?
They do allow her to do it as a multi-step process, but it requires so much effort on her part that she wants to only do it once therefore she wants it to be correct the first time. She also uses the computer consistently in class to cut down the editing time. The more complex the information is that she needs to write about, the harder it is for her to get it on paper. She also uses webs and outlines before writing to prepare. We have met bloackades before and eventually with time, we get around them, but time is running out. Next year she will be in high school where the expectations for writng in all classes are much greater.
Written expression tools
We use a scribe in school and speech recognition, spell checkers, and grammar checkers at home. Haven’t found any school-based programs that help.
We focus on the long term, transition to the workforce, where being skilled in the use of word processors and other electronic tools for written communication are essential.
I may be way off base here but this sounds like a processing disorder where written expression is the deficit.
Re: Written expression difficulties-basics are in place, can
Another idea, while you are remediating your daughter, is to try some really good technology. Inspirations has a great writing organization software and also draftbuilder. Draftbuilder has auditory spellcheck (a lifesaver for my 4th grade daughter) which she uses at home and with long written assignments at school. You can get a free 30 day trial of Inspiration at www.inspiration.com. It might be worth a look.
It did wonders for my daughter’s self esteem to learn that just because she can’t spell, and isn’t very good with organization of a book report, etc., she can still write and oftentimes these kids are extremely creative when the barriers are removed!
Re: Written expression difficulties-basics are in place, can
In addition to the helpful suggestions from others, you might look into using word prediction software. That really helped my son. Word prediction is good for kids who just can’t put it all together because they are having difficulty generating written language. My son used Co:Writer, but there are other programs as well.
Andrea
Re: Written expression difficulties-basics are in place, can
Co-writer can be good as a start as well. She used that at the end of 2nd, and all of third grade. Problem is, however, that once typing speed increases, it gets kind of frustrating. We “graduated” to draftbuilder. She, however, knows what she wants to say (she can dictate a GREAT story), but just can’t spell any of it and gets frustrated. Draftbuilder has the auditory spellcheck.
To take the spelling to the next level, I’d apply the basic remediation principles: start small and build. So if she’s got to apply the spelling rules and put all the skills necessary for writing, start with expecting that for a paragraph (or even a sentence) — and for the rest of it, allow it to be a multi-step process where she writes it first, then goes back to proofread later.
Could well be, though, that it simply *has* to be that two step process. My more severely dyslexic kiddos recommended proofreading from the last word forward so that you were looking at each word instead of reading the meaning of what you had written (but one was still capable of misspelling PCP…)