EASY WRITING STRATEGIES FOR HOMESCHOOLERS WITH DISABILITIES

This post can help parents and teachers teach children and teens who have disabilities to develop their writing, with a Christian worldview. For all of us, isn’t a major part of life, learning how to adapt? We often need to consider alternative solutions and “workarounds.” It may encourage students with disabilities and their siblings or classmates to see how many of us do this as a normal part of life. Those with disabilities may need extra consideration of how they can succeed with learning to write, but all students can benefit from aspects of these alternatives as well.
 
Three Tips for Positive Writing Experiences
1.  If they are able, have them learn to write positive affirmations on index cards to put about the house. Let them participate in where to put them…Such as taped to a mirror, on the fridge, in a backpack, etc. Since writing often involves sharing, this is an early part of learning to share.
Include affirmations that are promises from the Lord such as
 
Psalm 31:24 –
Be of good courage and He shall strengthen your heart, all you who hope in the LORD.

Psalm 84:12
Oh, LORD of hosts, blessed is the one who trusts in you!
 
Psalm 121:2
My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.

2.  If your students can’t write all of that yet, then let them write parts of it or color parts of it. Or paraphrase verses into positive cheers such as, Jesus loves me! Or Be brave! God will strengthen me! Trust God! Some children are “concrete” learners who take many things very literally. You may need to choose your positive affirmations with this in mind. For instance, Prayer is talking to God. He will always listen and care.

3.  Help them memorize your positive affirmations.  A fun way can be for them to take turns covering up a word, and then everyone tries to say the words together and guess what was covered up as well.
Or let them decide what volume each time you say the verse, and if it’s loud, encourage it to be joyful, praise loud.
Young writers can enjoy using puppets to repeat their phrases. Puppets can be a great and fun motivator. Here’s a link to a nice pack of finger puppets on Amazon. Click HERE.
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Once memorized, think of the joy your children can have repeating these phrases throughout their days…and even at bedtime. Once memorized, they can “own” these phrases and certainly know them “by heart.”
 
Help Your Children Embrace God’s Love Even Toward Their Disability

One of the most prolific hymn writers in US history, Fanny Crosby (1820-1915), was blind since early infancy. She is known for hymns such as “To God be the Glory,” “Blessed Assurance,” “I am Thine, O Lord,” and more than 5,000 other hymns. When she was young, her family, especially her grandmother, helped her memorize many parts of the Bible, which greatly influenced her beautiful, rich hymn writing. In some ways her blindness was more like a gift, by how it shaped her life.  She was known for saying she wished she had been born blind, so in heaven, the first face she would ever see would be Jesus’s.
 
What disabilities or extra challenges do we each have, that if closely examined have elements of gifts from God?
 
My husband used to say his daughter Rachel, with Down Syndrome, usually didn’t have a care in the world, and she could enjoy that family would always take care of her.
 
Joni Eareckson Tada, famous author and Christian radio host, and founder of Joni and Friends, a world renowned mission that provides wheelchairs to the disabled and gives Christian hope to those they serve, writes in her book, The Practice of the Presence of Jesus: Daily Meditations on the Nearness of Our Savior, that because she is a paraplegic she has been able to go through life‘s journeys slowly, and as a result, really notice God, in precious, intricate and big ways. The implication is if she lived a very hurried life, which so many of us do, she thinks she would have missed much of the joys that she has been able to have.

For the family--Joni’s beautiful book, Timeless Hymns for Family Worship, includes beautiful, inspirational passages in which Joni writes to young readers… and she shares with them her sweet paintings which she created with brushes in her mouth. You may also be interested in the picture book for children ages 4-7 that’s about Joni--Joni Eareckson Tada: The Girl Who Learned to Follow God in a Wheelchair (An Inspirational Children’s Christian Biography About Trusting God and Loving Others)

​More Ways to Nurture Their Writing
 1.  All children need time to write creatively, and depending upon their developmental level, it can look very different. That’s okay. Just be sure to give them that opportunity. Our Rachel who is now in heaven, wrote in the simplest way but loved to do it. It would often look like gibberish, but she would put her heart and soul into it.

She learned to write her first name. When this dear girl was grade school age, I tried to teach her how to put the silverware back in their individual sections in the silverware drawer. That turned out to be beyond her abilities, and so we let it go. She would need help with tying her shoes and things like that. She only lived to be 35, but what I’m about to say is quite powerful…

In her later years, she would emphatically write circles with X’s inside. She would write this line upon line across the entire page, and then want to do it again. It didn’t seem that she understood what she was doing. Years later, we see it was a message from God. What are X’s & O’s? Kisses and hugs. Please, let your children “free write” in any fashion they are guided to do.

Also, remember that this helps build the fine motor skills that are so important for many tasks in addition to writing. Even X’s and O’s are hard to write.

2.  It’s exciting now that children can audio record and see their words in writing appear, print them out, and read them aloud. You might find ways like this to adapt to your child’s level of development.

3.  Solutions can be creative and “tailor-made” to the needs of your students. One student with brain damage communicates partly with sign language. His mom helps him build on this success by first signing a word and then together they find the letters using the Scrabble board game. Once they organize the letters to form the word, he writes it.

 
“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
Presently I wear a rigid sling on my right arm mostly 24/7 for post rotator cuff surgery and will do so for six weeks. Since I am right-handed, I need to find ways to do things differently. Sometimes I discover better ways. I will give a small example. I make homemade yogurt. Normally, when I add the starter from a glass jar into the pot, I use a rubber spatula to get the remaining parts that cling inside the glass. When I could no longer do this, because of wearing my sling, it quickly dawned on me to just add a little water in the jar, close it up, and shake it. Voilà! It all poured out so nicely. Even when I am done with my sling, I think I will do it that way. Who needs to get the spatula and have one more thing to wash!
 
Perhaps this visual picture can inspire you to also remember that God has blessed each and every one of your children, and he will help you find creative ways to do things differently. They may even be better than how the rest of us tend to do things… or think things, or love things! May your children pour their hearts and dreams into their writing in new and refreshing ways.
 
Considerations

​1.  Is it a new challenge? Then allow for some extra time in the learning curve. Keep encouraging and noticing small but important steps forward.

2.  Foster a CAN-DO spirit. It may be slower, it may need to be intentionally different, it may be going against long-valued traditional methods.… But with joy and trusting in Christ, embrace working within and working around your goals and be ready to adjust them to help your child acquire skills and confidence with writing.
 
By the way, When Joni Eareckson Tada was a teenager, she became a paraplegic from a tragic diving accident in the Chesapeake Bay. During her rehabilitation, she prayed to God, that if He was not going to take her, to please show her how to live. Throughout her near 75 years of life, she has had an outstanding can-do spirit and inspires people throughout the world, on the radio, with singing, books, but especially for ministry. From her wheelchair, God showed her how to help those who are disabled. With His Grace, they created the ministry, Joniandfriends.org.

3. Give them lots of enrichment (for instance field trips, conversations, hands-on crafts, projects, science experiments, books, and movies) so they can adapt their own personal learning styles to subjects you are teaching, which you want them to write about. I pray you are pleasantly surprised to see how these experiences trickle into their learning and writing.

4.  Let them take the lead on some of the decision making, so they have a sense of ownership with each writing project.

5.  Be ready to give them some structure, so they do not feel overwhelmed. For instance, maybe they want a comic template, where they can write comments in the bubbles, or a graphic organizer, where they have some blanks to fill in to complete the story. A parent who homeschools her teenage son who has autism and speech, language, and attention challenges, does a wonderful job of presenting a concrete topic by showing a picture. Then she facilitates his writing by asking one question at a time, such as, What do you see? After her son answers each question, he is encouraged to write his answer as a full sentence. This life skill of learning how to describe things carries into important communication skills for other things that can be key for survival and well-being. Being able to express oneself helps build confidence, too.
 
Whether your children are writing about a project, science experiment, Bible story, or any other writing with a time frame, they may need sequencing structure to help them identify what happened first, next, and last. Connecting these dots can help build comprehension and awareness of cause and effect and other important brain development.
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6.  Keep telling your children, you are SO PROUD of them, and Jesus is too.
When they feel this kind of love, they can learn to be unstoppable for the paths God sets them on.
 
Dear reader, may you and your loved ones be blessed by this message,

Heidi Vertrees
Author/Educator
Victor Survives Being a Kid
newSongpress.net

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