Writing Tips

Thank you to Caitlin from Kindergarten Smiles for hosting this Freebie-licious summer linky party! Head on over to hear blog to find more great tips.

For this weeks linky party, I thought I talk about some of the adapted writing programs I use for the computer in the classroom to help some of my students with poor fine motor skills, print longer pieces of work.  These children often don't have the fine motor skills to either print legibly or to write with any speed or accuracy.  One of the easiest solutions is a word prediction program such as WordQ.

WordQ anticipates what a student is typing and presents options in the form of a list for the user to choose from.

As the child types, new options are presented until the given word is found.  The child would then click on the word or press the number of that word.  For example, in the above child example, the child wants the word "bloom" and would therefore press the #5.   In order to type the word "bloom" in WordQ the child only needed to press two keys: the "b" and then the "5" instead of the five keys it would normally have taken.  You can set the box to move along the sentence as the child types or stay put somewhere on the screen.  The dictionary can be costumized for a child so that words that would be readily found at their grade level will be available to them (Nucleolus would not appear for a grade one student).

WordQ can also speak.  When the mouse moves over a word in the list, it will speak the word.

WordQ works with any word processing program.Another piece of software that is works well with children of varying abilities is Clicker 5.

At the top of the screen is a word processor called the ‘Clicker Writer’. At the bottom of the screen is the ‘Clicker Grid’. In the grid you can create cells that contain letters, words or phrases that you can click on, to send them into Clicker Writer.  Students who do not have enough fine motor skills to activate a mouse can use a switch to activate the cells.  Clicker comes with picture support and the cells can also send a picture to the writer.

You can link pages in the grid portion at the bottom so that children have more options in their writing.

More information about Clicker 5 can be found here:

For Ontario students, Clicker 5 is ministry licensed and is available at all schools.

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