I posted a variation of this this on the special ed. board a few months ago, and I got some good responses, but I wanted to get some more ideas because I'm going nowhere fast. What do you do to teach writing to kids who, because of their disabilities, are minimally verbal? They don't have the language skills to say or write a sentence, and when they attempt to, it's awkward. For example, they would say "Us go park", and written it would be the same way. I am working with the speech therapist, but nothing is improving. I just want to see what other teachers, including ESOL teachers, would do. This child is not an ESOL student though.
What about sentence word cards...a different word written on each card, but the student manipulates the cards until they are in the order of a correctly reading sentence? Would they be able to complete a task like that, starting with simple 3-word sentences, and then adding things like adjectives, adverbs, etc.?
When I teach writing to English Language Learners (ELL), I use sentence frames to model appropriate language.
Maybe make repetitive mini-books with them? Put a picture on each page, and they write several times (and then read later) "We go to the park. We go to school. We go to the gym. We go to the store."
Thanks for the good ideas. I teach middle and high school, so I never even thought of the repetitive mini-books. I do use sentence frames right now, but they are still on the difficult side for the student. Do you have any good books or websites to recommend with sentence frames? Maybe I'm not doing it right. I like the word card idea, too.
VocabularySpellingCity offers a sentence writing practice game. The students are given a list of words and given space to type a sentence using that word. This is a great way to have a sentence starter. http://www.spellingcity.com/Games/sentence-writing-practice.html
I did not read through the replies, some this might have been posted already: I give sentence stems, and have them dictate to me and I write what they say and have them copy it. Also, they can start with drawing a picture and then write words (and again, they can dictate this to you). This would be the group I pulled during writing time.
