I have five students in my class who are identified and have special needs in the areas of reading, writing, and math. There are also many other students who are not identified, but struggle with academics, in particular, writing. When I teach writing, I guided the students through each step of the writing process. Generally, as the year progresses, I would give the students more responsibility, but many of my students struggle with writing. Some of the students have difficulty organizing their ideas while others struggle with presenting clear ideas and task initiation. My students that are more capable when it comes to writing struggle with adding details to their writing and writing to their full potential.
I have a special education teacher that pushes into my classroom during writing workshop. This is a great help because of the diverse needs of the students. Having the special education teacher in the room allows me to move at a pace that is not too fast or too slow. She is there to assist those students who need additional support. Several of my students with special needs have difficulty brainstorming and thinking of seed ideas. They have a difficult time narrowing down their ideas to a moment in time.
The majority of my students need support when it is time to revise writing pieces. The students tell me that their piece is fine the way it is. I give the students examples of new ideas to add to their writing pieces. If many of the students struggle with this task, I will have the students partner up and share ideas with each other. The students enjoy helping each other and have great ideas to share.
The editing process is a little more difficult because my students are all on very different levels. My more advanced students have few or no punctuation, capitalization, or spelling errors, whereas, my struggling students have many. For some writing pieces I will conference one-on-one with the students, but most of the time the students are responsible for editing their own writing pieces. I have the students read through their piece and check for capitalization, punctuation, and spelling errors. The students then raise their have and tell me any words they think they have spelled wrong. I write the words on the board. The students then independently correct the spelling in their writing.
For many writing pieces such as personal narratives, friendly letters, and thank you letters, I gave my students a template to help guide them in their writing. These templates allowed my students to focus more on the content of the writing and less on the format.
My students started this year on many different writing levels. Each individual student requires a different level of writing support. The students continue, to be at different levels of writing, yet they have all made major gains in writing this year. Some of my students simply needed practice with task initiation while others needed assistance writing clear ideas in a well-organized manner. I continue to differentiate my instruction in order to provide each student with individualized instruction in their areas of need.
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