The Written Word

First, a disclaimer: As an observer of speech-language pathologists, there is far more emphasis on the spoken word than the written word. Therefore, some of my opinions may be a bit extrapolated from what I have seen.

As noted in my first post, Billy is the one who really works on writing. His main writing exercise that I have seen is worksheets filled with punctuations to correct. Strategies employed mainly involve making the work fun and attempting to relate his exercises to real life experiences. The comma worksheet in the first post was a strong example of this - Ms. J only had Billy correct a couple of sentences at a time, with the knowledge that he would get to play when he was done. Ms. J explained to me the other day that having a written goal is extremely important, especially for younger kids. When she was arranging missions for Joe to understand prepositions, she gave him a mission card that clearly noted how many more exercises (missions) he had to complete before he got his reward (juice!). For Billy, who was older, the goal was spoken - he did not need the extra promise of the piece of paper.

I don't know how well Billy can spell, since he was correcting errors, but he has difficulty translating punctuation onto the sentences - where commas are needed instead of periods, if capitals or lower-case letters started a sentence, etc. However, I can extrapolate from his testing the other day that he would have some difficulty spelling more complex words. He can read pretty well, though he is at the point where he sounds out "blood" like "blude." What leads me to believe that he has difficulty spelling is that he has difficult separating phonemes when he hears them. For example, he could separate morphemes like cow- and -boy, dog- and house; but when asked to take the /t/ off of meat, he had some real difficulties. It was almost impossible for him to (quickly, at least) take the phonemes out of the middle of a word - i.e., taking /d/ out of powder, /g/ out of tiger. If it is that difficult for him to organize sounds when he hears them, it seems that it would be difficult for him to organize them on the page.

There was one other writing experience that I observed with a different child, Eric. He was helping to make a game board and had to write words like ship and good and turn on the board. I was the one correcting him, so I'm not sure what strategies the therapists themselves would have used, but they told me I did a good job when I told Eric to sound out the words, or separated them into individual phonemes themselves. He was at the stage where he was good at consonants, but was likely to mix the vowels in a little haphazardly. I'm not sure exactly why he was there, but he definitely seemed to be on track for his age.