Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional DD and writing

blackcat, your DD sounds very much like mine. She doesn't have ADHD and reading was not early, but the writing issues are very familiar. In our case handwriting turned out not to be the issue - it's fine now, at 11 - but thoughts to language to composed language on paper has been a huge struggle. It became a bigger problem before it became a smaller one, because the thoughts got more complex when she still hadn't developed the ability to get the simple ones out.

My DD uses web organizers a lot - the kind that look like a radiating pattern of idea bubbles. She has also put cartoons of her story ideas (no words involved, that makes it easier for her) on index cards, put them in chronological order, then made more cards to fill in the story until it worked. Then she could focus on sentence creation to tell the story that was already there in pictures. In 4th grade her teachers understood her issues and accepted the web itself in lieu of a written paragraph for many of her writing assignments; we have worked up since then, and now she can do the actual assignment if she takes it home and spends more time on it.

I wish I knew anything about IEPs, but thought I'd offer up our organizer ideas.

She sounds a bit like my son but since I can't get that sorted I am no help. The only thing that has helped so far is the teacher let him write a non-fiction response to her writing prompt. If he doesn't have to make stuff up it seems to go much better. The other thing of course it your dd may have written 2 good sentences and the majority of the rest of the kids may have written 1 to 2 pages of drivel.

Very interesting. Thanks. So was she actually drawing cartoons? DD hates drawing almost as much as writing.

I did ask her to tell me a story and gave her a starter. She wasn't thrilled about this but did tell me a very short story that made sense. I wonder if she could somehow dictate stories into a recorder then type the dictation.

Does anyone know what the "writing samples" test on the WJ actually entails? If I knew that, maybe I could figure out why she did somewhat well on it. I think it was 7th grade equivalent. Maybe she is Ok writing one sentence describing a picture but falls apart with anything more complex. But I don't know what that test is actually measuring or how it is scored.

The brainstorming/sequencing/hard to begin issues are all hallmarks of ADHD. These skills can be worked on separately (games that require thinking of many different items, for instance). They could definitely be worked on under an IEP. It is just very hard to convince people that it's a "can't" situation, not a "won't."

He gave me several scores on the phone that look like they have to do with writing. He said Hadnwriting was a SS of 100 and Writing Samples was 112. Then Fluency at 89 and Spelling 111. So I can't figure out what the difference between Writing Samples and Handwriting would be then. Hadnwriting is grade equivalent 3.6 and Writing Samples is grade equivalent 6.2 (I finally dug out the piece of scratch paper I wrote this on). None of this makes any sense.

Ok, I found this online. But it still doesn't really answer my question about what exactly they need to do for "writing samples":
Written Expression
[8] Writing Fluency measures the skill in formulating and writing simple sentences
quickly.
[11] Writing Samples measures skill in writing responses to a variety of demands. The person must produce
written sentences that are evaluated with respect to the quality of expression. Item difficulty increases by
increasing passage length, le
vel of vocabulary, grammatical complexities, and level of concept abstraction.
The individual is not penalized for errors in basic writing skills, such as spelling or punctuation.

Yes, the teacher seems to think she's just lazy and continually lectures her all day long. DD now thinks she's stupid and that the teacher doesn't like her. The reason I kept her in that school was because she was doing Ok with the old teacher. It wasn't a great situation but tolerable. Now we end up with this. At least there are only 6 or 7 weeks left.

My DD loves to draw. The trick was teaching her to sketch stick figure cartoons quickly, instead of doing the most realistic drawing she could in two hours. We tried recorder/scribing but that didn't work. Repeatedly. Just this year she finally realized it was an option when she scribed my recorded responses to an 'interview' - until now I think interacting with the technology was equally frustrating for her.
Everyone keeps trying to evaluate her for ADHD. Every time, it comes up negative. She has good fluency now, at 11 (writing short sentences that include a given word), but is completely blocked with larger works that require her to organize her own thoughts.

I hope you have a better time than we did; third grade was traumatic and took most of 4th and half of 5th to recover from. Part of it was other issues but most of it was being asked to do writing that was truly difficult for her, but no one recognized that or valued the work she put into it.

Thanks. I should tell her to just bring home her journal so I can see what she actually does there. She never has writing homework. I did see one story that she wrote online but it wasn't fiction, it was about something that happened in her life. It made me laugh because she wrote "Don't ask me to tell you what the hell happened after that." She said the writing teacher crossed out "hell" and wrote "bad word". She said "I thought I'd probably get in trouble for that but did it anyway."

I wish I could figure out how to help her or what exactly it is she's struggling with but since she doesn't bring things home, I just don't know. Her second grade teacher did say at the end of the year that her writing does not seem to match how smart she is otherwise, for instance she was writing variations of the same story about her dead cat over and over.

blackcat, I'm answering your post in pieces - hope that's ok!

Re the above, much of it sounds very similar to my ds who has DCD, not ADHD. *However*, I don't think the lack of interest in pretend play is necessarily a symptom of a challenge - I think that it's more a sign of how the particular person's brain is wired. Some traits such as not being interested in pretend play may occur frequently in children with certain types of diagnoses, I don't think it's necessarily a predictor of the diagnosis.


I think that the way to approach requesting an IEP is to start with understanding and defining what you want in terms of individualized instruction, then look for the data and tests that demonstrate and support the need for that instruction. It's jmo, but a relatively low score in writing fluency could be an indication of a child who has a difficulty getting thoughts out - or it could be an indication of a child who has slow handwriting - or it could be an indication of many other things. I think you'd have a tough time requesting IEP eligibility on a relatively low score on the fluency subtest alone. You can absolutely, however, advocate for help with written expression and use the writing fluency score as part of the supporting data.

polarbear