Writing Without Standards

In February, my class started to write! I had been reading about various ways to do this for my class. I decided to try it.

To start out you don't need much - just 2 things to get started.

1) Pictures are important - they help you to have a context for what your student in writing about. I used extra pictures from our scrapbooks, familiar symbols, and I would print off pictures of items that my students liked - favourite cartoon characters, apps, toys, etc.

2 ) Something to write in - I choose small notebooks as that is what I had in a cupboard.

Here are some samples from one of my students.

 

It is hard to see but she did print the letters 'sesame str.' I took those letters and wrote the whole phrase. I reinforced the letters that my student wrote by underlining the letters that we have in common.

 

In this example, she doodled but eventually wrote the word SUN. Again attention was drawn to the letters that she used and that word was turned into a sentence.

  

In this example, I used the app Abilipad to do some writing with the same student. I thought that I had created 3 pages to be written on over 3 days but she had other ideas! She went back and forth between the three pictures and would write on all of them. After I printed out the pictures, I highlighted the words that she independently typed.

Here is a one page handout to explain Writing Without Standards:

All of my students are able to use a traditional pencil to write so I do not have to use alternative pencils.  If your student/child is unable to print traditionally, use an alternative pencil. It could be a keyboard, eye gaze chart, alphabet flip chart, etc.


If you would like more information about Writing Without Standards you can access these resources.

• Erin Sheldon's Writing Instruction for Students with Angelman Syndrome, this is the handout that I used to create my one page How to
• Caroline Musselwhite's The Art of Attributing Meaning to Student Attempts

Predictable Charts

Over the summer, I read a blog post from Jane Farrall about using Predictable Chart Writing: Group Writing for All. This was an idea that I had first heard about when I attended a workshop presented by Karen Erikson.  She created a handout that addresses how to use Predictable Charts with students with disabilities. The handout is called Predicatable Chart Writing, you can find it here:

http://www.med.unc.edu/ahs/clds/files/how-to-handouts/PredChartWriting.pdf

I realized that I needed to increase our writing in the classroom, so I have started to do predictable charts. We are using the book "Look Up!" from October's Elementary Unique Learning System.   We were working on the sight word 'see' so they had to use see in a sentence about what they saw in the book. 

Day 1 - Each student dictates a sentence to me from the book.  I write it on chart paper, and we will read all the sentences together and then try and find the item in the book. 

Day 2 - I have typed the sentences and printed them off.  Each student will then cut the sentence up, we will recreate the sentences, read them, and then repeat.  (you can see the cut up sentence in the second picture at the bottom of the page)

Day 3 - I photocopy extra copies of the book and the student then needs to find the picture that matches their sentence.  We then write out our sentences in a class book, paste the picture and add our cut up sentence to the page.  

 Our Title Page:

A page from our class book:

From Predictable Charts we moved on to creating personal books.  I found Carson Dellosa clipart that matched the vocabulary words from the book "Look Up!" so I created a book for each student so we could practice using sight words and vocabulary words to create books to take home.

This was the title page and students had to add their name as the author.

  This is an example of what each page looked like:

While doing this activity we started to use our "Word Book" to look up words to know how to spell the various vocabulary words.  I will write a post about the visual supports that my students are learning to rely on.