Reading and writing has always been a challenge for my son. Ever since I pulled him from public school, getting him to work at these subjects has been like pulling teeth.
I've shared some ways that we've used imagination to help motivate him. Here's one more. I created an alien character that I pretended could ONLY talk through writing....that could only speak or understand written communication. I drew him on a dry erase board so I could easily change his expression and what he wrote. My son loved it. He read with absolutely no tears, and I kept the writing at his level (or helped him.).
This year the struggle was writing. I could not get my child to free write...AT ALL. He'd do copywork or spelling words or worksheets, but did not want to write down any of his own thoughts. So, I brought back the alien, and encouraged him to ask him questions in writing, and respond to what the alien replied...and it worked. I'm actually really happy about that misspelled sentence above, because it's HIS words and HIS spelling that he did it by himself without help (...well, except for the word "why"--I did jump in on that a little. But generally, unless he asked for it I didn't interfere or correct.) This was so needed not only so he could practice sounding out unknown words and work out his own phrasing, but so that I'd have a record of how he was really doing that wasn't pre-corrected.
This post is linked up on various linky parties including the Preschool and Kindergarten Link-up (cause even though my son is past that age, we used this technique with him late in KG too).
One of the first writing assignments I gave my sons was to write a story about a robot. It's similar to an alien, where their day is fun and interesting, so it gets the kid to write.
ReplyDeleteA Robot would totally work too!
DeleteGetting my son to write ABOUT anything was really hard...but when I asked him to write TO the alien, and had the alien write back, he was willing to do it. :-)