The Great Debate occurs every year: “Am I expecting too much of my child, or not enough? Is this groaning and moaning about writing just a discipline problem, or ‘character issue,’ or is there really a problem here?” Common comments I hear from home school moms are:

• “She can tell me the answers orally well, but then it takes her an hour to write it down!”
• “When he writes his spelling words to learn them, he leaves letters out of the words.”
• “If he dictates to me, the story is great, but he cannot write it himself.”
• “His dad says that he is just lazy and unmotivated. He can do his work if he really tries.”

One of the most common and most misdiagnosed processing problems in children is a blocked writing gate. This is the number one processing glitch in gifted children. Many of these children seem to be “allergic” to their pencil. They break out in whining as soon as they get a pencil or pen in their hand.

Let us look at what is happening in the brain of this child when he is asked to write something. God designed our left brain hemisphere to concentrate on learning a new task, such as driving a car or riding a bike. After some concentrated practice, that task is then supposed to transfer over the brain midline into the right brain, which is responsible for the automaticity of the process. If we imagine the left brain hemisphere as the “Concentrating Brain” and the right hemisphere as the “Automatic Brain,” we can see how this transfer allows us to “think and do” at the same time. Generally, when we teach a child how to write, after six months of practice that writing crosses over into the automatic brain hemisphere so the child can “think and write” at the same time. For many children, this transfer does not easily occur. Thus, they have to expend much more battery energy, or level of concentration, to a writing task than other children. In his book One Mind at a Time, Dr. Mel Levine calls these learning blocks “energy leaks.” This particular blocked learning gate, or “energy leak,” can be called a grapho-motor processing problem, a visual/motor integration problem, a fine motor problem, or dysgraphia.

This problem often explains the mystery of why many children learn their spelling words easily by writing them in a workbook or writing them five times each, and another child can write his words hundreds of times and still not store the spelling word in his long-term memory. Now, we realize that this struggling child has to use his “battery energy” just for the writing process, so the spelling words cannot be transferred into the right brain, where our long-term memory is stored. Thus, the method of copying to learn is totally ineffective for this child. Our job is to recognize this problem and to help him open up his writing gate, a process that can easily be done in the home setting.

Further  Investigation

Let us look at some of the symptoms these children who have a blocked writing gate are presenting to us daily:

• He makes frequent or occasional reversals in letters (after age 7).
• He makes many letters from bottom to top (vertical reversals).
• Writing is very labor intensive.
• Copying is poor, takes a long time, or is like artwork.
• He mixes capital and small letters in writing.
• He tells great stories orally but writes very little.
• He does all math problems mentally to avoid writing them down
• Lining up numbers in multiplication or division is difficult.

No child has all of these characteristics, but if your child has several, you may consider that this is an area in which he or she is struggling.

Compensation

When a parent recognizes that her child has a blocked learning gate—and is not being sloppy or resistant to writing without a reason—then some steps can be taken to alleviate some of the writing burden on the child until the problem can be corrected:

1. Reduce the amount of writing a child must do each day. Do more answers for chapter questions orally. Limit the amount of writing in workbooks.
2. Reduce or eliminate copying for three to four months. Save the child’s “battery energy” for writing paragraphs or papers and for doing math.
3. Use another method of learning spelling words that does not include writing in a workbook or writing them multiple times. Right-brain spelling, using a child’s photographic memory, is an excellent way to teach spelling without writing. (See www.diannecraft.org.)
4. Teach the child keyboarding for some writing projects. However, it is important to remember that most children who have dysgraphia also quickly find keyboarding quite labor intensive also, so it is not a complete answer.

Correction

It is important not only to compensate for this writing glitch but to also take steps to eliminate it so the child can experience fluency in the writing process. There are various methods that can be successfully used at home to correct this writing processing problem. The DVD “Smart Kids Who Hate to Write” (See www.diannecraft.org.) explains the method I found to be the least expensive while being the most effective for eliminating dysgraphia or any writing or visual/spatial glitch. It demonstrates a daily home exercise that crosses the midline to open the child’s writing gate, which increases writing fluency and eliminates reversals. This fifteen-minute exercise rehabilitates the visual/spatial system—no more left/right confusion!

In conclusion, a child can have a learning glitch, or a block in a learning gate, that causes him to struggle every day with schoolwork, without a parent’s knowledge. Using some simple checklists, the parent can identify this problem and design the school day to be less frustrating. More importantly, the parent can avail herself of all the wonderful, corrective techniques available so that the child does not need to struggle with the burden of having to work so hard at writing. God has wonderful answers for us. He leads us in so many ways, and we are ever grateful!

Dianne Craft, a former home schooling mother, has a master’s degree in special education and is director of Child Diagnostics, Inc., in Littleton, Colorado. She speaks at home school conventions around the country. For more articles written by Dianne on children and learning, and some teaching videos, visit her website: www.diannecraft.org.

The post Smart Kids Who Hate to Write appeared first on Texas Home School Coalition.

Ten years later even that percentage has dropped. I read through scores of incoherent, fragmented, unpunctuated papers, written by students who graduated from well-funded high schools with small classrooms and qualified teachers.

What are those students being taught before they get to me?

It is not that they do not write. In fact, in an effort to solve the problem of poor writing skills, schools are giving longer and more complex assignments to younger and younger children. The theory is that the more writing children do, the better they will get at it; as one proponent of this theory recently told me, “Give the children high-interest assignments and have them write, write, write and revise, revise, revise.” First and second graders are told to write journal entries; third and fourth graders are assigned book reports and essays. Fifth and sixth graders are given research papers.

Meanwhile, writing skills continue to decline. For the last ten years, at education conferences all across the country, I have heard the same refrain from the parents of these children: My child hates to write.

There is a central problem with the write-more-and-you-will-get-better method. It treats writing as though it were analogous to speech: the more deeply you are immersed in it, the more competent you will become.

But writing is essentially unlike speaking. Children have an instinctual, inborn desire to speak. Any child who is developing normally will learn to speak if spoken to. The more a child talks, the better her verbal skills become.

Children do not have that same innate drive to write. Some children scribble as soon as they can hold a pencil, but the majority do not. Even children who are taught to read and are surrounded by written language do not necessarily learn how to write—because speech and writing are fundamentally different.

Writing, unlike speech, is not a natural activity. Mankind survived for a very long time without finding it necessary to put anything down on paper. Until the nineteenth century (which is quite late, in the larger scheme of things), even the largest empires chugged along perfectly well with shockingly low literacy rates. Administrators and bureaucrats had to be able to read and write, but the masses functioned quite well without paper and pencil. If they had been unable to talk, on the other hand, their countries would have fallen apart.

Written language is an unnatural, foreign language, an artificially constructed code. Compare written dialogue with any transcript of an actual conversation, and you will see that written language has entirely different conventions, rules, and structures than spoken language. The rules of this foreign language must be learned by the beginning writer—and they have to become second nature before the beginning writer can use written language to express ideas.

This is why so many young writers panic, freeze, weep, or announce that they hate to write. Try to put yourself in the position of the beginning writing student: Imagine that you have had a year or so of conversational French, taught in a traditional way out of a textbook, with practice in speaking twice a week or so. After that first year your teacher asks you to explain the problem of evil in French. You are likely to experience brain freeze: a complete panic, a frantic scramble for words, a halting and incoherent attempt to express complicated ideas in a medium which is unfamiliar. Even another year or two of study will not make this kind of self-expression possible. Rather, the conventions of the French language need to become second nature, automatic—invisible to you—so that you can concentrate on the ideas rather than on the medium used to express them.

The same is true for young writers. Ask a student to express ideas in writing before she is completely fluent in the rules and conventions of written language, and she will freeze. She cannot express her thoughts in writing, because she is still wrestling with the basic means of expression itself.

I have become convinced that most writing instruction is fundamentally flawed because children are never taught the most basic skill of writing, the skill on which everything rests: how to put words down on paper.

Writing is a process that involves two distinct mental steps. First, the writer puts an idea into words; then she puts the words down on paper.

An INARTICULATE IDEA becomes an IDEA IN WORDS.

An IDEA IN WORDS becomes WORDS ON PAPER.

Mature writers are able to do both steps without paying much attention to the fact that their brains are actually carrying out two different operations. For the beginning writer, however, even a simple writing exercise (“Write down what you did this morning”) requires the simultaneous performance of two new and difficult things. As a result, the student struggles—just as a baby who has barely learned to walk will struggle if you ask him to simultaneously perform some other task (such as rubbing his head). All of the baby’s attention needs to go into moving his feet until that action becomes automatic. If you ask him to walk and rub his head, he will probably freeze in one place, swaying back and forth uncertainly—just like many new writers.

Young writers need time to learn the conventions of their new language. They need to become fluent in it before they can use it to express new ideas. In most cases, though, students are simply immersed in this new language of writing. While immersion techniques often work for spoken foreign languages, they do not work nearly as well for writing—which is, after all, an artificial code rather than a natural speech expression.

Occasionally this process produces a perfectly willing and competent writer—one who has a natural affinity for writing and can intuitively grasp those parts of the process which have not been explicitly taught. Other students, however, remain puzzled. They become frustrated and resistant, always struggling with the task of getting words on paper, never competent enough to let their ideas flow out.

Instead, the process of writing needs to be taught in an orderly, step-by-step way. This is when classical methods (narration, copywork and dictation in the earliest grades; outlining and writing by models in the middle grades; and, finally, studying rhetoric in the upper grades) excel—in setting young writers free to use their medium, rather than wrestle with it.

The post When Writing Programs Fail appeared first on Texas Home School Coalition.

Later, in eighth or ninth grade, objectivity and analysis became the major thing. The literature-loving language teacher, with genuine sincerity and enthusiasm, determined to extract from you a character analysis paper, or perhaps a compare-and-contrast essay. Burdened with new and unpleasant vocabulary words such as “foreshadowing,” “metaphor” and “sub-plot,” you wondered what kind of person would actually ever choose to ruin a good book by having to talk and write about it ad nauseam. After somehow struggling to squeeze out your five pages (this time typed, double-spaced), you received the paper back with marvelously helpful red ink margin comments similar to: “This doesn’t work,” or “Needs smoother transition,” or perhaps “Topic unclear,” or worst of all, “Develop this.” “If I had any idea how to implement these suggestions,” you mutter, “I would have done it in the first place!” Fortunately, the semester was soon over, and you were not thinking about having to write another literary analysis paper . . . ever.

Now you are all grown up and trying to teach writing yourself. You believe your students should write reports and do literary analysis essays like you did, but being a compassionate person, you would like their experience to be less stressful than yours. How can you help? More importantly, though, you should ask yourself, why? Why ask kids to write reports and essays? What should they learn from the exercise? What did you learn? Unfortunately, we bring to teaching all the experiences we had as students ourselves, some of which are perhaps less than ideal. Therefore we should occasionally take a moment and rethink the purpose of the assignments we give.

First of all, let us define what we mean by “report” and “essay.” A report is basically the collection and presentation of existing facts. In police work, journalism or administration, to “report” on something means to state the necessary facts clearly and concisely. Similarly, children’s “reports” serve much the same purpose, and give a student opportunity to learn and practice several basic skills:

1. How to locate sources of information, get an overview of a subject and choose possible topics.
2. How to limit the number of topics for the report and select from available references a limited number of facts pertaining to those topics.
3. How to organize those facts and present them in an engaging, understandable way.

The term “essay” implies something more than just reporting facts; by definition, it includes the opinions or thoughts of the writer. Expanding a simple report into an essay by adding an introduction and conclusion, we teach children how to “frame” the topics and, especially in the concluding paragraph, how to comment on the relative importance or underlying significance of the facts presented in the body. As essays become more sophisticated, commentary is smoothly integrated with factual information inside the topic paragraphs themselves, and in persuasive writing, topics and facts are selected and presented in such a way as to cause a strengthening of, or a shift in, the opinion or attitude of the reader. Because essays are built on facts, effective essay writing develops from a foundation of good report writing.

In writing a short two- to three-page report on a subject such as Japan, or Benjamin Franklin, or the French Revolution, the first task of any student is to determine the topics. Generally, the number of topics will be based on the assignment length. (At the junior high level, a paragraph with a topic sentence, five to six details or facts and a clincher sentence will average approximately 90-130 words.) Next, the student must find and choose specific facts about the topic. Let us say he (or she, of course) has chosen the subject of Benjamin Franklin with four topics: Franklin the child, Franklin the author, Franklin the scientist, and Franklin the statesman. As there is a lot of information available about these topics, no one would imagine that you could tell everything there is to tell about Franklin in three pages, or even ten pages, and perhaps the subject (Franklin) should be narrowed. But let us assume the student proceeds with these topics. Now, several good things happen in the process of tackling this. Of course, the child will undoubtedly learn a few things about Mr. Franklin. Second, he will have to exercise his discriminative faculty and make some decisions—choices about which facts among the hundreds available he will use in his report. How will he choose? There are two basic methods: choosing what is important, and choosing what is interesting.

If the child feels he needs to choose what is most important, he will read the reference looking for facts that seem to have the most significance. How does a child determine what is most important? Without a breadth of cultural literacy and life experience, it is hard for him to know which facts truly carry more weight than others. In many cases, he is primarily trying to find the facts that he thinks the teacher will consider the most important. On the other hand, when a child feels free to choose what is most interesting, what will he be doing? Searching for the things which best capture his attention or imagination, he is engaged. He gets excited. He enjoys the process. Now, perhaps you are the type of teacher who feels that what is important is more important than what is interesting. Possibly you are the type of teacher who thinks that what is interesting is more interesting than what is important. Although a good report will have a balance between the two, which teaching approach will encourage the best writing? More vitally, which approach will teach the skill that the child most needs?

If a student selects his facts based on what he thinks you want him to choose, is he really making a choice? Is he exercising his independence, his will, his intellect? Or is he simply trying to make you happy. Consider this teaching approach: “Hands on structure and style; hands off content.” As long as a child presents his facts according to the model and checklist for the assignment, does it really matter about what facts he chooses to write? Is it not more valuable for a child to practice of the act of choosing than to always be trying to second-guess a teacher? Let the children decide what they want to write and run with it. Even if the facts they choose are not, in your opinion, the most important or significant things about Japan, or Florence Nightingale or the Apollo missions, the very fact that they made a choice is what teaches them to think, to be bold, to write. “What they choose” is not nearly as important in the long run as “that they make a choice,” even if in their childlike simplicity their choices are not the “best” ones. As they grow and mature, their sensibility and choices will improve, while the freedom to make choices in report writing will have strengthened their fundamental ability to think. This year, as you assign reports to your students, let them know that what you are really looking for is not “what” facts they choose, but “that” they do choose facts and put those facts on paper with structure and style.

The post What? or That! Reflections on Reports appeared first on Texas Home School Coalition.