Special Education

5 Ways to Prevent Writing Difficulties for Students with Special Needs

While in my experience no two students with special needs are alike, there are certain things that they do seem to have in common. One of these is the fact that written tasks and assignments cause the most difficulty. They’re a lot harder to teach and have students succeed in than more interactive subjects like listening, speaking, and reading. Unfortunately, writing is an integral part of early education. It has a huge impact on a child’s success in later years. It’s almost impossible to do well in any other subject if a child can’t sit and write answers well, which is why learning how to write from age 5 is so important. If you are a parent working on writing assignments with your child at home and finding it to be a prolonged and tear-filled process, see if any of the techniques below make things easier. Share them with your child's teacher and your IEP team as a way to make writing more successful and less stressful for your child (and you, when it comes to homework). It doesn't take a lot to turn the page to an easier writing experience.

1. Give Clearer Instructions

While typical students often respond to fairly vague direction, a student with special needs will need things stated a little more directly. This may mean including extra instructions and more indication regarding what the assignment should contain, and leaving a lot less room for interpretation. This can give students the confidence they need to be sure of the task they’re doing, as well as better concentration. As you have given them something specific to focus on and write about, they will also have less opportunity to get distracted while they’re trying to think of a topic.

2. Provide Relatable Context

Sitting and writing without purpose can be a challenge to all children, but it can be an even greater difficulty for students with special needs. However, if you change the task so it’s not just writing but writing to achieve a greater goal that they understand and care about, they may find the whole assignment a lot easier. This is so easy to implement—you can link the writing task to other things the student has learned, or even just ask students to write to a specific audience. They’ll then have a much better idea of how to communicate and what is expected of them.

3. Promote Mind-Mapping

This is particularly useful for students with ADHD or similar problems. One of the main issues they face when they try to do a writing assignment is organizing their thoughts. They struggle to structure their work, and their ideas come out kind of jumbled. While this isn’t so much of a problem with very young students for whom writing assignments are simple and short, it will be an issue as they get older, so I try to promote good habits from the start. Mind-mapping provides a way to let all of their ideas spill out onto paper while sorting them into something that makes sense. You can clearly mark out an introduction, a conclusion, and certain phrases to use in each paragraph so students don't overlook any important features. Essential parts draw focus at each stage.

4. Create Personal Dictionaries

Spelling is an essential aspect of writing, especially for school-age children who are writing by hand rather than typing. While regular dictionaries and spell-checkers are always a great idea, a personal dictionary can be a lot more useful to a student with special needs. This only needs to be an exercise book that they can use for the specific purpose of spelling and keeping a record of words they know that they struggle with. Writing down a word the correct way along with its meaning will be much more memorable that simply looking something up in the dictionary, so it builds vocabulary skills for the long term.

5. Break Down the Task

Help the student review work on a step-by-step basis. Highlight the importance of a good introduction and conclusion, and key words to be included in each. If it works for the assignment, it can even be helpful to allocate a set number of paragraphs. Each small unit is less intimidating to start out on than an entire essay or paper