Research that Benefits Children and Families—Uplifting Stories

For this blog post I am going to share an article and give some personal stories about my children because they have learning disabilities (LD).  The article I am going to share is "All Children Can Write" by Donald Graves. Donald Graves is to be considered the father of how the process of writing for children. This paper focuses on the fact that poor writing skills has more to do with what a child knows. The example that is in the paper is about a child who would cover their paper and have a lot of black smudges all over because of him trying to spell. Many children do not realize that writing is not just something that you need to know but it is a form of communication. "There was not attempt to connect his writing with the communication of ideas" (Graves, 1985, p.1). When the correct approach is taken children understand this but with the wrong instruction they see it as just something they have to do. When the child was diagnosed with visual motor problems the approach then they took a different approach to helping this child write. The teacher took time to find out what he was interested in. The teacher allowed the boy to teach them about something he was interested in which help change is perception about writing. "The writing-process approach to teaching focuses on children's ideas and helps children teach the teacher or other children in the class what they know, with emphasis first given to ideas and clarifying" (Graves, 1985, p.2). The realization that writing can help a child to communicate with other children. When children understand that their writing is being read by other children can help them understand the importance of written communication. The two basic principles that have been gained by the research is that teachers teach best by showing and the environment must be structured. What I gained from this article is that teaching writing is about showing children the meaning of writing. My children struggle with writing and find it time consuming.

My oldest is ADHD and one of the problems is that sloppy hand writing is just a fact of life. The reason is because it takes too long. She understand writing is a communication form but it is hard to spend the time writing because it takes a long time. Attention span is a struggle. My middle child struggles with writing because she has short-term  memory issues and she had fine motor issue early in life. She is very frustrated when she writes because it is a struggle and time consuming . Both my children's writing difficulties flow over into reading for one reason or the other. Because of Donald Graves research my children are taught differently how to write. They are not treated bad or talked differently about. Children all learn on a different level I found this article interesting because it was 35 years of work and they made many strives to help impove the experience of children learning to write.
Reference
Graves, D (1985) All children can write, Retrieved from http://www.ldonline.org/article/6204/?theme=print