Scaffolded Writing Resource-One of My Favorite Things

When working with students with significant disabilities writing can be one of the most difficult areas.  We can accommodate for it with voice to text features easily but there are some students who can develop handwriting skills and then need some supports for putting complete thoughts together.  This particular resource I find to go hand in hand with reading.  The Fundamentals in Sentence Writing  coaches students to identify verbs, subjects, prepositional phrases and more of sentences.  It begins with simple sentences but the resource will take students through complex sentences as well.  

I consider it a reading support as well.  Many students may have great word recognition skills but struggle with comprehension.  When using this resource not only are students guided to write complete sentences but it will also support their comprehension as it gives them a framework to decode the sentences they read and understand the main idea of each sentence.

I would especially recommend this resource to resource teachers as you could potentially be able to group students working on the same level together.  As happens in special education as a constant, it is rare that all students are working on the same skill at the same level but it can still be used for small groups in your self contained classroom as well.  Personally I like making small booklets with the materials like you see below.

Why do I like it so much?

Well I like it for it's structured approach to first identifying components before writing right away.  I also like it because there is an assessment component built in already and it has multiple practice opportunities for each skill.  There are 4 different student sheets for each lesson and each lesson is a small increment from the former.  I also like it because it covers all sentence types and then there is another resource similar for paragraphs so for classrooms that loop students you can seamlessly continue their learning.  For classrooms that do not loop you can identify exactly where students are for their continued learning.

​I would pair this resource with another one of my favorite things No Glamor Grammar shout out to Mrs. Faulkner one of my cooperating teachers long ago).  Although the Fundamentals resource teaches parts of speech it can be supplemented with the very direct exercises in No Glamor Grammar which covers nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, contractions and all things grammar.

Let me know what you think if you've tried it and as always I hope this helps someone somewhere.😊✌🏼