Using Visual supports for writing

Last Friday we held a workshop here at Sommerville and invited SENCO's teacher's and teacher aides to participate.  My colleague Donna and I presented on teaching reading and writing to Children with Special Educational needs. This was well received by all who attended.

As part of my presentation I reiterated to importance of using visuals with our students.  I also demonstrated  how to use Colourful Semantics and showed the progress students have made using this programme. In my previous blog posts, I shared more information on Colourful Semantics, so please have a look.

In this post, I would like to share a WOW moment we had with one of my students who would not engage in writing. We have been using 'Who, doing what , where". Here are some visuals that we used.

This student , who has very complex needs, was not engaging is any form of writing, but after many attempts at using 'Draw and talk', as explained in my previous blogs and engaging the student with real experiences, the students attempted to write ' I want to go to the beach hotel". This was a huge moment for the student and celebrated by all.

He had gone on holiday and we used the 'real life experience' to encourage him to write about his holiday. He was not motivated to write independently, so we used the photos from his holiday and asked him what was happening in each photo. We also used , 'Who, doing what" This is what he said. I added it to clicker sentences and the student was able to put the sentence in the correct order. He felt really proud of his work and wanted to share it with his teachers and family.