Composition for the Dyslexic/Dysgraphic

[Reya]

Someone asked me about teaching composition to dyslexic kids. The question was explicitly NOT about handwriting, but handwriting is the first key. It's hard for a child who writes laboriously and messily to express himself in writing. So that's where I'll start.

 

My DS isn't a writing-avoidant as many kids with dyslexia are, but he has dysgraphia and so has a hard time even though he likes it.

 

First, I chose Getty-Dubay Italic handwriting. When we started at five, his handwriting was frighteningly subpar--far worse than mine at the same age, and I was always had the worst handwriting in class. A "W" would take up a whole line. I had not actually seen that level of problem with any child of normal intelligence before--without serious global developmental delays. (This was a child who scored in the MR range in a draw-a-figure test, too, though he was already doing above-level mathematics.)

 

We stuck with Getty-Dubay, but after seeing it, I'm convinced that Cursive First would have worked equally well. We concentrated on copywork alone for an year. He had absolutely no required writing that wasn't handwriting or copywork. He worked on handwriting and copywork, together, about 30-40 minutes a day that year. I gave him VERY little, but he was extremely slow. Writing a single line of text on K-sized paper took him 20 minutes at first. I increased the work as he got faster and worked HARD on letter-shapes, spacing, and size.

 

The second year, we began "composition." I didn't care what he wrote as long as he got the hand of coming up with words and writing them down. We started with him dictating stories, then him editing them in a guided fashion to make sense, and then him copying the final result. Soon, he was able to start writing short stories, analyses, and reports. We have continued to work on handwriting daily.

 

I make a big deal of correct capitalization and punctuation at the end of a sentence. He still forgets at times. We correct spelling at the end of the writing lesson, and he's not counted off or "in trouble" of any kind for making a spelling mistake as I don't want him to stick to words he knows.

 

His assignments have either been stuff I've come up with (narrations, book reports, factual reports--all very short) or from a creative writing prompt book. Right now I'm not that concerned with what he writes but that he can write his ideas down with fluency. Developing skilled writing comes later.

 

Next year, just to take the burden off me, I'm using Classical Composition. There are some VERY silly elements--teaching Greek names for incredibly specific figures of speech, for instance--but it breaks the writing process down into usable (if artificial) elements very well. I'm both impressed and bemused by it. I think for my son, though, it will work well.

 

Yes, my kiddo's only 7, but he's both highly gifted and highly disabled. He NEEDED reading to help his speech, for instance, but then his language processing problems and dyslexia interfered with learning reading, and each time he got hung up, I had to find a way around. With both mild dyslexia and dysgraphia myself, I had a decent idea of the needs and the pitfalls, and went from there. When he isn't hitting walls, he progresses amazingly fast. He's now reading high school level books. His handwriting is even above average for his age, and the corrections were done painlessly!

 

His writing and spelling lag behind the most. He's only doing third-grade spelling, and that's his true spelling level. A lag between reading and spelling is common with gifted kids, but it's not usually that large. For example, his best friend, who is a year younger (K-age) reads at a late 5th grade level (I tested them both!) and probably spells at a solid 4th grade level. That's a normal lag. Reading at maybe an 8th-grade level and spelling at a 3rd grade level is an indication of pathology.

 

We may be switching to Pollard's Synthetic Speller/Advanced Speller (available free on Google Books!), which will present things much more clearly and rapidly than Spelling Workout and will raise his spelling level dramatically compared to what Spelling Workout can do. The only reason I'm keeping Spelling Workout at all at this point is that the exercises are hard for him, and so he needs them. He's not good at text discrimination, and SWO helps with that.

 

Here's a recent, very typical example of his writing, with punctuation/capitalization and spelling preserved. He's gotten really lazy with composition recently, so it's time for a change--that's awesome, though, because being able to even be lazy means that it's easy for him:

 

The Black Death

 

The people who lived in the Middle Ages were dying. This was a sickness. It's from rats and fleas. Nothing could stop it. It went on and on and on. It was horrable.

[peacefully]

This is an awesome post. Thank you for writing this out. My 5yo ds has SPD and vision processing-related handwriting issues. We're currently seeing an OT, but I given how difficult writing is with him, I've been wondering how I need to handle it in coming years. Your post is very helpful. I'm Evernoting it for my notebooks. :D

[Reya]

I'm glad it's helped!

 

You know, I bashed Classical Composition several years ago for its artificiality. I still stand by my criticism, but right now, I think DS needs that artificiality to give him a solid framework for judging his work, if that makes sense.

 

The other kiddo I do curriculum for (but no longer teach-hallelujah!) will be doing Classical Writing next year, which from my writer's standpoint is my favorite curriculum.

[PeterPan]

Hey Reya, any websites or books or anything about interpreting that discrepency between the reading and spelling scores? That's definitely interesting to me.

 

I wouldn't assume he's going to remediate spelling quickly, simply because he's smart. More likely, it will go in one eyeball and out the other, unless you find some magic method I haven't found yet. There's repetition, being focused (as opposed to distracted), not being fatigued, doing it in context (dictation sentences), all the usual things, and now I'm curious about Pudewa's suggestion that it needs to be auditory and sequential. Dd's visual memory helps her, but it still is no substitute for whatever is fouling up in there. So if she really thinks about it, she can pull up the words. But if she's just flying along, thinking of other things, and writes something, it will likely as not come out incorrectly. And yes, her discrepancy between reading and spelling scores is so large, I just assumed the reading tests were flawed.

 

Imitation is a worthwhile method for giving them quality models for their sentence structure. I've also been realizing some of the things we did early on were ON-TRACK, even when I didn't know it. We did SWR (which has them read flashcards, probably the only reason my dd reads so well, since she doesn't sound out words), listened to hours of audio books each day, started with cursive (preventing reversals), etc. The audio books are something I'm wanting to get back to. We slacked off on them as my dd progressed, and my dd's reading actually plateaued this year. I had said for years that my dd read so well because she had heard the words before from all those audio book hours. I didn't REALIZE how true that was.

 

So on the spelling, I don't know. Marie Rippel of AAS will be at the convention, and Pudewa is giving a talk on it. Pudewa is dyslexic, you know. I haven't found any magic bullet. We've done more, we've done less. Their visual memory kicks in and masks their problems, but it's still not right, not intuitive or easy. It really doesn't relate to knowing the rules, so that's why I don't think working through that book will be some magic bullet, but that's just my two cents. I do see my dd approaching spelling a bit more analytically than she did in previous years (K-3rd or 4th). That of course is the change in brain thought process as they mature. They start to see everything afresh, anew, and make new connections.

 

I switched her over to a fountain pen this year, and that helped the pain with writing immensely, as well as improving the overall appearance and fluidity. I still can't get her to bring her letters in together, so your sprawling comment is familiar. Unfortunately, it tends to make letters illegible if they sprawl too much. :ack: I think I may have hit my limit on where we can get physically (just by sheer force, making her do it, exercises, etc.), so I'm pursuing the vision route, to see if there's anything there. Then we'll go back to the physical side and practice more. (Jan Bedell has some stuff that interests me.) Dd also has headaches in spite of low level reading glasses (and 20/20 vision), which apparently is another indicator that vision is part of it. I didn't realize she was still having headaches till I asked. She just thought everybody had them, ugh.

 

So that's just a sprawling bunch of nothing I guess. I wouldn't eliminate CW and the others so out of hand. Because of all the audio books and good inputs all these years, my dd writes quite well. It just hurts her to do it. She is also starting to outgrow and weary of the whole imitation thing. I'm hoping the new models in Homer B will perk us back up, just enough to get through it. Diogenes Maxim should be a nice change of pace, since it gets away from so much imitation. But for 2nd, 3rd, 4th, imitation is a good thing. Narrations are good too. I was just reading an article someone send me that seemed to indicate the reason IEW works so well is because of the KWO's (key word outlines). I was remembering back how WT2, which went very well for us, had something similar. We lost that in CW Homer, and that was where she started getting really overwhelmed at getting it all onto paper. She just gives up and hyper-summarizes. Anyways, that's another drop in the bucket, a thought. I'm not sure she actually USED her KWO's in WT2 for the actual writing, but just the process of going through the model and creating them organized stuff better in her brain. (At least that's my theory, I'm all theory.) So I figure we could apply that anywhere. SWB has them outline, but the less they want to write, the more tedious and frustrating that outline is, more of a torture exercise than anything.

[RootAnn]

:lurk5:

 

My oldest is "pencil-phobic" with a large spelling/reading gap (although it has lessened some this year) who previously tested as "mildly dyslexic" with virtually NO visual memory.

[PeterPan]

RootAnn-So what type of tests did they do for that? I was told about something called a multi-faceted test, sort of a mixture of IQ, visual, and whatnot. Then the lady started talking about social tests and it sounded weird.

 

BTW, the problem with the pencil phobic is they hit higher grades and have a hard time comfortably getting out everything they need to for the increasing assignments. So you either modify a lot (done that), be mean and just make it get done (done that too, not good for the relationship), or try to figure out what in the world will help the pencil-pushing problem. It's just up until a week ago I didn't know there were words for all this. I just lived it with her, sigh.

 

And yes, her discrepancy between spelling and reading was 4-5+ grades if you compare SWR and McCall-Crabbs scores. I just figured there was something wrong with the McCall Crabbs books. Didn't occur to me at the time it was a sign. You never see it as a sign when you have so many disconnected pieces. It's when they all come together that the light comes on...

Edited April 6, 2010 by OhElizabeth

[Guest]

You are describing my daughter a few years back. She had fairly severe dysgraphia that was officially diagnosed when she was 11. At that point her writing was still often illegible, it hurt her hand to write more than a few words at a time, she had (still has) a dysfunctional pencil grip, writes with her nose by the tip of the pencil, drops letters and punctuation when writing full out. She read at college level at age seven, but couldn't spell most three-letter words.

 

I did find that she had undiagnosed vision problems. Among other things, her eyes didn't work well together; she was actually involuntarily blocking vision in one eye at times. She had little peripheral vision or depth perception. We spent nearly eight months in sports vision therapy -- GREAT results in terms of being able to track, throw, and catch a ball at long last, loss of anxiety about fast-moving objects, ability to ride a horse in an arena with other riders and see not only where they were but where they were going. A few months afterwards, she went from having no reading stamina at all despite a really high level of comprehension/vocabulary to reading fine print adult books in two days.

 

As far as hand pain and writing stamina, what has helped, strangely enough, is horseback riding. She has to groom and tack up horses all the time -- she has a job helping there as well as her own lessons -- and doing all the buckles, shoveling poop and sawdust, using the grooming tools, braiding manes, etc. have all done wonders for her hand strength. She can now write two or three pages of single-spaced stuff at one go, and most of it is legible.

 

Spelling, however, is still another story. She seems to be a visual rather than auditory speller, but her visual system is still somehow miswired, so she will still on occasion randomly mix the right letters -- they're all there, but in the wrong order. However, Spelling Power has for some reason worked quite well for us. At fourteen, she now looks at a word she's written and knows whether it is misspelled -- and we're talking fairly advanced words like imperceptible or disciplinarian. She can usually figure it out in isolation. But when she is writing a draft and thinking about what she is saying, the spelling gets all wacky and punctuation drops out (although grammar is no problem). I don't know how to untangle this problem, but as she has been making such progress in the past two years I at least have some degree of hope that her brain is maturing and making connections as she grows that will allow her to put most of it together in her own time, particularly as she is a motivated writer -- in some things anyway.

 

We have not spent time on outlining because of the strain of so much additional writing. My daughter too had trouble summarizing, though. She could repeat the longest things nearly verbatim but could not summarize main points. I finally had her do this a few times: write a summary in any form -- list, chart, graph, web, or sentences -- that would fit on half a piece of lined paper. The next day, discuss main and supporting points, then rewrite a summary that fits onto an index card (no fair using teeny writing). The next day, discuss again, then write a caption or headline or phrase that fits onto a post-it. Using brightly colored paper and index cards helped too.

Now we sometimes do a comic strip: three or four little segments, with dialogue or thought bubbles holding the main points.

 

I hope it helps to see a few years ahead of where your kids are now and know that progress and maturation does continue to happen -- I used to be afraid it all stopped dead during adolescence, but that doesn't seem to be the case, for which I am deeply thankful! And the more I loosen things up, allow her a choice in how to express a summary, for instance, or how to respond to a book, the less pressure and stress are laid on the writing and the better it seems to go -- she no longer feels there is one single "right" way she has to follow rigidly, and is becoming more confident and willing to try different ways of approaching a piece of writing.

 

I'm in awe of all you guys; you have so much more insight and knowledge than I did when my daughter was younger and you are doing so much to accommodate your children's strengths and work on their challenges. I feel as though I see what works, but as to finding it I'm still struggling in the dark and just occasionally bang into things that work.

[PeterPan]

Oh my lands KarenAnne, you don't know HOW crazy this is, because I had been thinking to myself recently (not connected with anything about schoolwork) that I thought it would be good for dd to ride and help care for horses this summer!!!!!!!!! It never OCCURRED to me that it could do so much for her!!!!!!!!! You're right, the hand strength probably is involved. Jan Bedell, who is coming to the convention this week, sells some objects on her website for the dc to manipulate. Thing is, an almost 11 yo isn't going to want to do those things for very long. It totally hadn't occurred to me to find the same hand-building strength in the real world, in a way that would suit her!

 

Well keep spilling the ideas, because you're what I need! :)

[PeterPan]

I finally had her do this a few times: write a summary in any form -- list, chart, graph, web, or sentences -- that would fit on half a piece of lined paper. The next day, discuss main and supporting points, then rewrite a summary that fits onto an index card (no fair using teeny writing). The next day, discuss again, then write a caption or headline or phrase that fits onto a post-it. Using brightly colored paper and index cards helped too.

Now we sometimes do a comic strip: three or four little segments, with dialogue or thought bubbles holding the main points.

 

 

Can you explain this a little more? I was trying to figure out if it was stages for the summary narration/topic (expand and contract) or if it's a list of different ways she can chose from to summarize/outline the material of the day. And you're totally right, the more fluidity in the assignment, the more my dd runs with it and finds a way that is comfortable to her to get stuff out. I totally screwed up and tried to pull together this fancy lapbook on the Civil War. She groans about it every. single. day. But I told her for WW1 and 2 she could do a display board. Suddenly she's all beaming and excited. We just won't tell her it's the same thing, just in a different size. :lol:

 

Sports vision therapy? I think I've heard of this. I'm pursuing a developmental optometrist, but I have no idea what they'll find in their testing. She has headaches still with reading and schoolwork, despite low level glasses for reading, so I think SOMETHING is wrong. Did your dd have the sprawl to her handwriting? I've tried for years to bring it in and haven't been able to. Will vision therapy help with that? The fountain pens made her writing much smoother, more fluid, and less painful, but she still doesn't bring her letters in tightly or accurately.

 

Don't admire us, mercy. I had so many signs I left unmissed, so many things I just assumed she'd outgrow or thought were normal. I had teacher evaluators tell me I just needed to work her harder and be more firm and consistent. Well I'll stop ranting, because it only makes me unhappy and angry.

[PeterPan]

Spelling Power. I think I looked at this ages ago. Karen, would you actually RECOMMEND it now, or do you favor something else? We did SWR plus the Calvert cd's plus misc. workbooks plus dictation for so many years, I was kind of weary and took this year off, thinking her visual memory would take care of it the rest of the way. I haven't tested her again, but my subjective take is our progress has stopped. So we either go back to SWR (which we could do, I didn't burn it) or try something else. The Apples spelling drills book looks like a nice workbook for her, complete with Biblical themes and whatnot. I really like a workbook just for another way to get in some practice without taking so much from me. I know we get better results if I interact, but it's hard to do that for EVERYTHING, sigh.

 

So anyways, if there's a less torturous option, that would be interesting. She always found the words in SWR quite boring, said they were on the most frequent list for adults and not at all what she wanted to spell. No reason to remember something you're not interested in spelling! LOL

 

Oh, and lest somebody recommend AAS, let me say we've been through all the rules, all the everything with SWR. Right now I have her analyzing the words in the MCT vocab. We just have to get back into it, start covering new stuff, and get that brain rolling again. If I could do it in a less mean way, that would be nice.

[Guest]

OhElizabeth, you are so right about the occupational and/or physical therapy -- my daughter was told to work with therapy putty with her right hand, and to lift cans with her right arm. Both absolutely bombed because they were assignments, they were boring, and most of all, they made her feel that something was "wrong" with her. The work with horses, on the other hand, is a real world way to accomplish the same goals. Plus my daughter's riding instructor recently told her to go get a kettleball exercise thingie and begin doing lifts to strengthen her core muscles. She is doing this without one single murmur, because it relates to horses. If anyone else had recommended this is any other context, it would have been so much empty noise.

 

I so much hope you can find somewhere for your daughter to be around horses and see if it is the great boon for her it is for mine.

 

I will answer your other questions tomorrow; I had wine with dinner for the first time in a couple of years and I'm feeling a big unfocused (pleasantly, though).

[Guest]

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