What is essentials in writing? I think I'm going to have to teach her myself. Even the special ed staff don't necessarily know what to do. I'm pretty sure my other kid (in a different school than the one I described above) has dysgraphia but his problem is more handwriting and dd's problem is more the result of impaired executive functioning. She has no clue what to write or how to organize her thoughts to get them on the paper. She also now has anxiety about writing, making everything worse, because teachers have mismanaged her for so long. If she was sitting there staring into space rather than writing they would yell at her to focus and make better choices. Her math scores are similar to writing. For instance applied problems pulls her overall score up into the average range. She qualifies according to having a severe discrepancy, but I don't think that school districts are forced to give a student services unless they are failing.
This describes DS16's problems with writing to a T. Issue came up again tonight unresolved. Tonight was particularly bad because he was supposed to write about himself. He just gets stuck and had ZERO idea's and then he gets anxious and the situation gets even worse. What's frustrating about the whole thing is once he gets past this stage the mechanics of writing come easy. So when we get over these humps, he gets good grades on his writing. But writing almost always gets turned in late.
My DS16 does had a 504 accommodation for this that we got this past year. But all his accommodation gives him is the right to turn things in late. When he gets stuck there really is no way to push through it and he need to look at it fresh the next day. All the teachers and tutors we have keep trying to emphasis pre-writing skills like making outlines or brainstorming. But that doesn't always help particularly if it's creative writing. Sometimes it helps to re-frame the question. I'm going to have to ask his English teacher to do this tomorrow on his current assignment. Since DS is a sophomore in H.S. he is supposed to talk with her himself. (Doesn't help that this is a 2nd long term sub for this class this year.) This seems to be a unhelpful perfectionism where he can't write something stupid or wrong or incorrect. And he seems particularly incapable or writing about himself.
I find questions that are personal are WORSE that stuff that is concrete. So "write an essay about an experience that happened to you" is near impossible but a social studies report doesn't cause as many problems. So sometimes a prompt can be re-framed. DS's Spanish teacher this year figured this out. And since all she cared was that he wrote a paragraph using specific vocabulary changing the prompt made the assignment a lot less difficult.
