Writing Services - Sentence, Paragraph and Paper Writing

Writing

Aspire can offer two types of writing services:

Handwriting for Print or Cursive
Sentence, Paragraph and Paper Writing (with Assistive Technology instruction as needed).

The Wilson Reading System provides fantastic resources for teaching print and cursive. You can call us to schedule handwriting instruction. For current Aspire students, we work it into our Wilson Lessons during the spelling portion of the lesson.

For sentence, paragraph and paper writing, we have tutors certified in The Institute For Excellence In Writing Style and Structure Program.

Our handwriting program is appropriate for kids with mild to moderate problems with handwriting automaticity. For many current Aspire students, we are working this into lessons as time allows.

Writing sentences, paragraphs and papers is the hardest skill for a child with dyslexia to master because it is the synthesis of reading comprehension, spelling and handwriting. All of these skills are very difficult for a struggling reader and speller. Writing tutoring typically is not successful until the student has a solid foundation in handwriting, reading comprehension and spelling words using all six syllable types.

When your child has achieved near grade-level reading and spelling, we can begin tutoring them in the Institute for Excellence in Writing Curriculum. This curriculum was developed by Andrew Pudewa, whose son had dyslexia.

The curriculum centers around learning to identify key words in text, and taking those key words to create sentences, paragraphs and papers in the student’s own words. Our tutors help the student use the key words, and the ideas they chose from the text and “talk out” what they want to say. Typically this process delivers an a-ha moment where the student realizes they can write about what they think, and that their thoughts and opinions matter.

Aspire has used it successfully to help students we tutor to gain confidence in writing and overcome the belief that they can’t write and have nothing to say. Our first goal when teaching writing, is to give the child the foundation that they can write about the thoughts they are thinking. When they come to this realization, writing becomes more achievable.

Typically, we teach children with dyslexia how to handwrite their notes and thoughts, and then how to dictate it into a Google Doc using Speech to Text technology available on their computer. Speech to text still has problems and mistakes, so editing is always challenging, but we work carefully with students on this process as well.

The biggest stumbling block for writers, is they will only choose wording they already know how to spell. Children whose handwriting is extremely laborious, and who are years behind in spelling, must first get these skills more automatic before writing tutoring can be successful. Aspire recommends our writing services to students who have graduated from an Orton-Gillingham program or can demonstrate near grade-level reading and spelling on a standardized test.

For more information, give us a call

Scheduling can be quite complex, so we prefer you call our office to schedule tutoring