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How to Inspire Kids that Hate to Write

How I love to get challenging and difficult students, because they always help me to grow and find new, exciting pathways to learning. For the past few months, I have been working with a discouraged and easily agitated 4th grader that, "hates to write." In fact, he would shut down and spin into a tantrum when asked to hold a pencil. So, what can we do to reach students when they are disempowered and shut down to learning altogether? Let me share some tools and strategies with you! Why Do Some Students Struggle to Write? Writing, like reading, is a very complex task that requires learners to multitask numerous skills. If any of these skills are weak or cumbersome, it can create a sense of cognitive overwhelm that can lead to a sense of learned helplessness. Academic learned helplessness is a perception that there is nothing one can do to overcome academic struggles. As a result, efforts dwindle and avoidance of the task can result to the point where failure is chosen...

What Fun Writing Games Motivate and Inspire Students?

Writing can be a wonderful and creative activity for students, however, if learners hate the process it can be difficult to teach them this needed skill. So what can be done to motivate struggling writers? Why Do Kids Hate Writing? There are a number of reasons a student may hate to write. Hand writing is difficult, labored and even painful. Many of these learners are much more intelligent than their handwriting would indicate, so many will do whatever they can to avoid writing. Multitasking with the many skills needed to write is overwhelming and taxing. Students can not truly multitask until all the skills needed to write are learned to automaticity. Therefore, it's often helpful to strengthen any weak skills in handing writing, key boarding, grammar, spelling, sentence formation, as well as the organization and visualization of ideas. Associating writing with poor grades or discouraging comments can create a sense of learned helplessness. Wr...

How to Meet the Individual Writing Needs of Your Students

With large classroom sizes, it is often challenging to meet the individual writing needs of each student. What makes it doubly difficult is the writing process involves a complicated synergy that requires students to physically write, type or dictate , implement rules of written language/spelling, as well as generate and organize ideas. Those are a lot of tasks that require attention, and every student comes with their own unique preferences and needs. So How Can a Single Teacher Manage the Writing Needs of Individual Students? I find that when most students receive a graded, written assignment, they rarely look past the number. However, sprinkled across their papers are colorful hints and suggestions on how to accomplish higher marks as well as personalized clues on how to develop greater mastery over the written word. The best way to meet the individual needs of your budding writers is to provide the metacognitive strategies, tools, and feedback so that they can consciously le...

What are the Signs of Dysgraphia and Solutions for Success?

Dysgraphia is a learning disability that affects written language: spelling, capturing ideas on paper, visual-spatial skills, and fine motor skills such as handwriting. Different terms are used to describe these difficulties. In fact, the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 (DSM-5) doesn’t use the term dysgraphia but uses the phrase “an impairment in written expression” which is under the category of “specific learning disorder.” What are the Signs of Dysgraphia or Impairment in Written Expression? Handwriting is Messy or illegible Covered in cross-outs and erased text Burdened with improper spacing between letters and words Hindered with oversized and crooked letters and words Disrupted with a combination of lower and uppercase letters as well as a mixture of print and script Misaligned when doing math problems Labored written language includes Pencil grip is cramped and strained Word repetition Word and punctuation omissions ...

How Can I Improve My Higher Order Language Skills?

When concepts first move from concrete ideas to abstract ways of thinking, some students start to struggle for the first time. This can happen because they have weaknesses in higher order language skills. Higher order language skills , also called higher level language or metalinguistic skills, refers to advanced language processing. It requires abstract and deductive verbal reasoning skills and the understanding of advanced vocabulary and word relationships. But what are the common signs? You Might Have Higher Order Language Problems if: You have problems predicting outcomes. You have difficulties with implied meaning or inferences. You have problems with pragmatic or social language skills. You have difficulties expressing your ideas in words. You struggle with writing skills. You have problems with main ideas and details. You have difficulties understanding jokes, riddles, and humor. You struggle with writing summaries and paraphrasing. You have difficulties ...

Powerful Orton-Gillingham Friendly Games that Bring Delight to Learning

About 20 years ago, when I first began offering students one-to-one Orton Gillingham based reading remediation , I was having to bribe my students to read long lists of words, word parts, and nonsense syllables. My enticements began with candy, moved to stickers, and finally morphed into a well-stocked prize box. This worked, but I found that I was getting my students hooked on external reinforcements, and that what I really wanted was for them to be internally motivated. I wanted to kindle a joy for learning. How Could I Bring the Fun Factor into my Lessons? I began to look around for game-like activities that could make the learning process fun. What I found were simple matching activities and bingo-like games, but nothing was addressing the specific syllable and syllabication rules. In addition, writing, inferences, following directions, main ideas/details, and other language based learning struggles, were pretty much all addressed through boring workbook pages. Clea...

Scrible: Amazing Annotating Writing Tool for Dyslexic and Struggling Writers

Like a complex braid, great writers weave and multitask with sentence rules, spelling, idea formation, content organization and more. And when learners struggle with one or more of these processes, writing can become a frustrating tangle of ideas, an apparent, impossible knot to unsnarl. Research papers can be particularly tricky, because students also have the added obstacles to collect relevant articles, organize the information into a structured layout, paraphrase and manage citations. This week, I am so excited to share with you an assistive technology video blog with Victor Karkar, the CEO of Scrible. Scrible is an amazing online tool that students can use to annotate and color-code online text and simplify the process of writing research papers. This extraordinary technology, that is recognized by the National Science Foundation, can help students to read and write more efficiently. What's more, it offers a step by step process that can be monitored and supported by teac...

Number 1 Trick to Improving a Student's Writing

There are many effective strategies worth instructing that can improve a student's writing, but my number one, favorite strategy is teaching the effective use of a thesaurus. What is a Thesaurus? A thesaurus is a book or online site that lists words in groups of synonyms or related concepts. What are the Benefits of Teaching Students to Use a Thesaurus? Teach your students or children to use a thesaurus. This offers many gains and can be used to: Expand vocabulary - Using a thesaurus helps students increase their usable word choices. Avoid repetition - Consulting a thesaurus guides students to alternate word choices when they are concerned with the overuse of a single word within their composition. Improve writing quality and sophistication - Utilizing a thesaurus assists students to select more appropriate or mature wording. Select descriptive words - Consulting a thesaurus helps students find more descriptive words that will enable their audience to better visu...

Free Text to Speech Software Can Help Students Edit Papers

Text to speech software is a valuable tool that comes for free on all Mac computers, and now a number of free apps make this technology available at no cost for PC users too. Text to speech has been used as an accommodation for struggling readers, but did you know that it is also an advantageous device for writers too? In fact, I often teach my students how to use this technology to help them edit their written language. What is Text to Speech Software? Text to Speech software is a form of speech synthesis that converts text to a spoken computerized voice. This technology was originally created to aid those with vision impairments so that they could hear the written text. How can Text to Speech Help Students Edit Their Writing? Many students struggle to edit their own work because when they go back to refine their text, they often glide over mishaps and read it as they meant to write it. Furthermore, there are many errors that are easy to make but difficult to see. For...

Show Don't Tell 2: A New Descriptive, Suspense Writing Game

Have you ever read a book that you couldn't put down, because the author's words allowed you to visualize the scenes as if you had a movie going on in your head? These authors are masters of descriptive writing and have learned to paint pictures in their audiences' minds eye through the use of descriptive and figurative language. Have you ever read a book that you couldn't put down, because the author's words allowed you to visualize the scenes as if you had a movie going on in your head? These authors are masters of descriptive writing and have learned to paint pictures in their audiences' minds eye through the use of descriptive and figurative language. H ow Can Descriptive Writing Be Taught to Students? Many teachers instruct their students to "show" their readers the scenes through rich descriptions, instead of just telling the audience what happens. In fact, a common critique that students might hear is, "Show me; don't tell me!...

Developing Writing Skills for Students with Dyslexia

Do some of your students struggle with subtle linguistic cues, tricky wording and following both oral and written directions? Difficulties in these areas can make it challenging to complete all aspects of an assignment, interpret multistep directions and comprehend multiple choice tests. This is a common problem for students with dyslexia and other language-based learning disabilities, however, most students benefit from the development of this skill. So what can we do to help foster these skills while bringing in the fun factor? Like reading, writing is a complex process that requires students to multitask. In fact, all students must master a number of fundamental skills before they can be expected to become competent writers. However, for students with dyslexia, the process can be even more challenging as their learning disability may impact cognitive tasks such as spelling, word finding, as well as the formulation and organization of ideas. What ...

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