Hi Mo,
This is probably going to get broken up into two (or more? lol) replies, because I only have a little bit of time at the moment, and I also have quite a bit of this pushed back into my long term memory so it takes awhile to recall
The test that our SLP gave my ds that showed discrepancies is called the CELF-4. If you want to know about any of the testing details, let me know.
The first thing that ds' SLP did when she started working with him was spend time evaluating the different initial steps in the writing process. Our school district and area are heavily into the "6 Traits of Writing" so if you're looking for a way to try to think of writing in steps, you can google 6 Traits and find some info to start with. There are more steps-within-the-steps, but it's a good starting point. DS' primary challenge is generating ideas, so once the SLP understood that she focused on working on generating ideas and that's what they spent most of his first year of speech therapy working on, and even though she's added in additional skills over time (organizing, adding descriptive detail, etc) they still work quite a bit on generating ideas.
I don't remember the very first set of types of exercises they worked through, but I do actually still have them in a notebook, so I'll take a look for you. The SLP learned a few things about ds from that worked that help - he needs a bit of a "jump start" for his brain to get set in motion so she worked on finding ways for ds to first, be jump-started (talking to another student to brainstorm was the first), then worked to where she realized it was just talking that helped with the jump-start (didn't have to be about the writing assignment), then realized that just moving his mouth helped (go figure?) so if he chews on gum or a granola bar or something that can be a help... which is something he can do at school at his desk without making any noise.
The other thing the SLP did at the very beginning was to research dysgraphia and written expression challenges. She used a book written by Virginia Beringer to come up with ideas (I think it's called the Source Book for Dysgraphia... but will have to dig my copy out to be sure). One thing she took from Beringer's book was the idea that dysgraphics are challenged with automaticity in more ways than just the act of handwriting, so any of the steps of writing that are taught in the classroom and most kids pick up on quickly might take repetition + repetition + repetition + and on and on for a student with dysgraphia. This is one thing that continues to be a challenge for us in school - writing concepts are shown as an example in class, the students practice that idea on one written assignment, then next week they are given an entirely different type of writing skill to learn and they practice that - and that works ok for NT kids who aren't challenged with written expression, but it meant that for a kid with a written expression challenge and dysgraphia my ds would *maybe* clue in just a bit (with a ton of help and support)... and then instead of getting that same type of assignment to practice again (and again and again until he truly "got" it)... wham, the class has moved on to something else and he was always lost. I think that's something that's especially difficult for teachers to understand with a gifted kid, because in math/science/any kind of class discussion about history/social studies, whatever, ds has that osmosis-capability of understanding and remembering everything the first time he hears it.
One thing that helped ds (and wasn't with our SLP) was a school assignment during 4th grade. Every Monday morning the first thing the students were supposed to do when they came into school was write one paragraph about what they did over the weekend. The paragraph had to have 2 sentences. The teacher had a graphic organizer that listed "topic sentence" and "detail 1" "detail 2" and "concluding sentence". It took the *entire* year for ds to get to where he could write that paragraph, but he was able to eventually write it because a) there was a very clear set of directions, b) the directions never varied so he was able to practice practice practice until he understood how to do it and c) he spent his weekends literally making sure he did two things so he would have two ideas to put down in that paragraph.
Back to his SLP work... one of the things that the SLP did with ds a lot early on when they worked on generating ideas was to play games with him (board games, kid games, the type of games that two people can play together). They were either games that had word-generation as part of the actual game, or they would take turns having to generate whatever words they were working on whenever he or she lost a turn on the game (or won a turn). We've continued to use this technique for generating ideas on homework assignments for several years, although ds is slowly needing it less and less.
I'm going to pull out ds' SLP notebook and come back and list some of the other specific types of work they've done together.
One other thing I would keep in mind when advocating is to realize that your ds is probably very unique. Our SLP had never worked with a student like ds before.. and she's an SLP who's worked for many years in our school district and has always worked exclusively with young children). I suspect there really *aren't* that many kids with 2e expressive language challenges.
Gotta run - more later!
polarbear
