How to Teach a Teenager With a Learning Disability How to Write a Paragraph

Organizing ideas and cramming them into a correctly written paragraph is a huge obstacle for many students with learning disabilities. Here are some ideas to ease instruction and move your students forward in the writing process.

Instructions

Difficulty: Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Dictionaries
• Thesauri
• Pencils
• Colored Ink Pens
• Erasers
• Index Cards
• Pens
• Spiral Notebooks

1. Read. Read out loud. Read independently. Listen to books on tape. Read a group story and then watch the video. Talk about character feelings, plot, setting and all other aspects of the story. Immerse your students in reading and build writing experiences from the topics and ideas you read about.
2. Teach your student how to write a sentence. A student will not feel confident writing a paragraph, if writing a complete sentence is difficult. Go over the subject, verb and attributes of writing a sentence. Start simple and gradually move to complex sentence writing. Let your student master sentence-writing before expecting paragraph-writing.
3. Teach the writing process. There are four basic steps to writing: thinking of an idea, writing a rough draft, revising and correcting mistakes and publishing the finished piece. Practice each step. Spend one whole week just coming up with and talking about ideas, including any characters or plot lines for fiction, and the logical order of facts for non-fiction. Spend another week just putting ideas on paper. Let your students pick the topic that is of greatest interest to them and spend another week revising and polishing the writing piece.
4. Make visual cues. Make posters or folder sheets for students to follow and refer to through every step of writing, and use them to remind or motivate a student having trouble writing.
5. Have several spelling strategies available for students to learn from and use. One of the most frustrating aspects of writing for teenagers is not being able to spell.
6. Think of creative ways to publish your students' work. Have your students make artistically creative frames for their paragraphs. Create a class writing journal to put favorite writing pieces in. Create a writing portfolio for every student - this is good for showing and reminding the frustrated student how far they have come in their writing.
7. Move slowly through the writing process. Go back and reinstruct if you need to. Eventually you will spend less time instructing and practicing each step and your students will be ready to move on to writing essays.
8. Write about everything. Write about science, history, physical education and yes, even math. Provide a list of relevant or educational topics and let your student choose what to write about. Write in journals and avoid correcting everything your student writes. Let your student become comfortable with writing and transferring ideas to paper.

Tips & Warnings

• Have your student make a personal dictionary with a spiral notebook or note cards and a recipe holder.
• Encourage your student to us the dictionary instead of telling her how to spell a word.
• Let students who have physical difficulty manipulating writing instruments use the computer or word processor.
• Know when to give your student a break. Focusing on a problem area for too long can prove frustrating and make efforts of instruction futile.