Does anybody have any tips or strategies you use to teach writing? What does your daily writing look like?
Here is my "pop-in" for my WE kiddos. Written Expression is a complex task that requires the integration of multiple cognitive, linguistic, and motor abilities, including spelling and handwriting. Common characteristics of students with a disability in written expression are ineffective strategy use, minimal output, limited revising, and weak basic skills. Students struggling with writing frequently have coexisting difficulties in other areas. Students who struggle with writing require intense, explicit instruction. Effective approaches for teaching written expression includes: 1) adhering to a basic framework of planning, writing, and revision; 2) explicitly teaching critical steps in the writing process; and 3) providing feedback guided by the information explicitly taught. Recommendations for improving writing: set clear and specific goals for each writing product; encourage the use of word processors; and teach students how to write more complex sentences using methods like sentence combining, in which simpler sentences are combined into more sophisticated ones. Graphic Organizers Allow them to record thoughts orally in tape recorder then have them go back and write it. Have them Write Main Ideas, review with them, then tell them to "flesh it out with elaboration"
I teach conventions, conventions, conventions! I cannot believe how may of my kids (and gen ed kids too, to be fair) have somehow gotten to 5th or 6th grade and still don't know how to use basic capitalization and punctuation. I think the "writer's workshop" that they do in their classrooms focuses more on the higher level process and not really on the conventions. My younger students are working on dictated sentences (I dictate to them, they write) and we focus on where capitals go, spelling, spacing, and punctuation. After that we move on to knowing what a sentence is (since most kids write huge run-ons or just put a period at the end of every line on their paper). For this I do a lot of examples where they have to read through a run-on and put in the correct punctuation. If kids think that one line of the paper equals one sentence, then I model writing for them on the board and have them count the number of sentences. I have the correct sentences every day and also integrate writing into all of the other subjects. Any time they write, they must write with correct sentences, even if it's something like a math assignment. If they try to hand something in with basic convention mistakes, I hand it right back to them and tell them to fix it. I think writing is a life skill and letting kids go from grade to grade without knowing how to write a proper sentence is doing them a huge disservice. I think it's one of the things that I teach that they'll actually use the most in the real world. When they demonstrate that they can write correctly then we start working on things like organization and specific types of writing.
I have a few that can write sentences but when we write a paragraph (let's say about a writing prompt), they all want to start the sentence with the same word every single time.
