Reflection 3

I was simply amazed by the list of characteristics of students with dysgraphia, as many fit my son. Poor letter formation and incorrect/inconsistent slant of cursive letters make his writing so difficult to read that he often gets answers marked wrong when they were not. He also has a problem with letter size, spacing and alignment as well as he writes really slowly. I had always thought that he was just lazy and was not trying. (I think I felt this way because he is a G.T. child .) Other signs/symptoms of dysgraphia are incorrect use of upper case and lower case letters. Problems in fluency of handwriting can cause problems in other areas, perhaps even moreso than some of the other dysgraphia symptoms since writing is so laborious that the child may loose their place even while writing.

I found it interesting that by high school most develop a hybrid writing style, I thought it was just me.

I like the idea of teacher modeling since every time the children see the teacher write they can see what their hand needs to do to make the letters look the way they should. This in combination with tracing and writing letters along with naming the letters as they are written is a good place to start. As abilities improve I would move on to independent student practice and writing words. It is likely to take a while to get to this point especially if the student(s) in question are very young or very far behind. If there is time left in the school year I would then move on to having them copy sentences. I would also have the student(s) use self monitoring to check their own improvement and instill confidence in the new abilities they have gained. Also I would use phonemes before I even started teaching spelling words. They do this at Eustace and it seems to work well. For the first two, six weeks no spelling words are taught, just the phonemes. Sounds and letter combinations and expected positions in words are taught and the children make their own flash cards each week to give them extra practice, they bring the cards home and show their parents how to say the sounds. Also at the beginning of the year a large card with all of the sounds and letter combinations are sent home so that parents can practice with their children from a legible list. I like this format and have seen that if a child is given enough time they can excel in spelling by doing this first. I spent hours practicing in the hall with a group of girls that never got help at home. A girl by the name of "Mattie" was an ESL student so her parents didn't even understand the phoneme cards at all. She went from making somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty to thirty percent on her weekly phoneme tests to making sixty to seventy percent with the addition of my one hour per week help. It was clear that what she needed was the extra practice that she was not able to get at home. Another girl "Sherry" did not make any improvement with our practice and ended up being identified as having a learning disability, she is now going into fourth grade. While not on par with some of the other students she is doing better than I would have expected back in first grade when I worked with her.

To get children writing i would have them all write in a composition book each day. Each day a student will pull a popsicle stick out of a bucket with a subject or starting line on it. For example one might be pulled that said "If you had 100.00 dollars what would you do with it?" or "I enjoy _______ more than ________, because..." This gives students an opportunity to write about something they like be it cars or animals or the WWF. They are getting guidance without being pigeon holed into writing about a specific thing like "What I did during summer vacation" or "My family is..." I would give them about five minutes to write the story and then another five minutes to draw a picture to go with the story. The drawing gives them a bit of a break and will likely "recharge" them. In these beginning stages I would only ask that the first letter of a sentence be upper case and that there be a period at the end of each sentence so that the child(ren) are not bogged down with mechanics and make it easier for thoughts to make it to paper. As thoughts begin getting to paper more readily I would then start having them follow more of the rules of writing.

While vocabulary or lack there of might be a problem for students I will have a word of the day to help reduce this problem. I will write it, say it, tell them what it means and review it during the day. As the children leave class for specials, lunch and recess I would ask them about the word of the day. I would also offer a small reward for students catching me using the word of the day, maybe all students who caught me during the week would get to sit with me for lunch the next Monday, a fun way to start a week. This would give me an opportunity to just have conversations with the children without so many time pressures. I would be modeling how to put thoughts together further increasing the children's abilities in writing since speaking and writing are so interconnected.