A hands-on guide for anyone who teaches writing to students with learning disabilities

This valuable resource helps teachers who want to sharpen their skills in analyzing and teaching writing to students with learning disabilities. The classroom-tested, research-proven strategies offered in this book work with all struggling students who have difficulties with writing-even those who have not been classified as learning disabled. The book offers a review of basic skills-spelling, punctuation, and capitalization-and includes instructional strategies to help children who struggle with these basics. The authors provide numerous approaches for enhancing student performance in written expression. They explore the most common reasons students are reluctant to write and offer helpful suggestions for motivating them.

Includes a much-needed guide for teaching and assessing writing skills with children with learning disabilities

• Contains strategies for working with all students that struggle with writing
• Offers classroom-tested strategies, helpful information, 100+ writing samples with guidelines for analysis, and handy progress-monitoring charts
• Includes ideas for motivating reluctant writers
• Mather is an expert in the field of learning disabilities and is the best-selling author of Essentials of Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement Assessment

...

Two reasons educators want to implement this book's Building Blocks model in their classroom: They'll have an innovative framework to help them understand the reasons why students in K-12 struggle. They'll have the proven strategies to help students learn. The Building Blocks model is practical, supported by research, and easy to implement. It identifies ten areas important to school success (the building blocks), divided into three levels: the foundational level includes attention and impulse control, emotion and behavior, self-esteem, and learning environment blocks the symbolic processing and memory level contains the visual, auditory, and motor skills blocks the conceptual level comprises using strategies and thinking with language and images A detailed questionnaire for each block helps identify a student's strengths and limitations, cultivate their strengths, address the weaker areas, and develop appropriate accommodations and instructional interventions. Each chapter contains proven teacher strategies to give educators direct information to meet students' individual needs. Once educators understand the causes of students' classroom challenges, educators can design individualized and effective interventions....