Writing about personal experiences should be a fun process, and yet students with learning disabilities (and many in regular education classes too!) struggle to come up with topics or get stuck somewhere along the first few lines. By providing visuals and sentence frames, teachers guide their students’ thinking process and can help them come up with great topics, captivating beginnings, and powerful words.
Because a blank piece of paper could be a scary sight, students should be encouraged to draw first. If a child picks a familiar topic, he/she should be able to draw independently. That should help them organize their thoughts, and ease them into writing. Without spending the entire time drawing, students should be allowed to create drawings as a starting point, then encouraged to begin describing their drawings in writing.
Writing is the ultimate goal of the Writer’s Workshop, but teachers should base the process on their students’ abilities. For those who can write independently or with the help of a word processor, providing visuals and a bit of guidance might be all the help they need before they set to work on their own. For those who cannot write independently, working on their own is a source of frustration for so many reasons, like poor executive functioning skills, poor motor skills, etc. With this category of students, dictation should be considered. Some students have a vivid imagination and can dictate amazing stories when given the chance to work one-on-one with an adult. Regardless of their independent working skill level, all students should be provided with sentence frames as references. Find all my visuals here.
When students dictate their stories, adults should write down students’ words verbatim. Editing should be saved for the end, once the story is completed, in order to maintain students’ focus on the crafting of the narrative. Just like with everything else, editing should be based on a student’s ability to sustain attention, stay engaged for longer periods of time, as well as focus when the amount of text is larger. If a student’s ability is limited in any of these areas, the teacher may choose to limit the steps of the editing process, as well as limit the number of errors the student should be asked to correct.