We have a NEW Computer Writing Lab! It will have software from Don Johnston, Inc designed for writing literacy. Students that need help with composition, spelling and all the components of writing will make progress in our learning lab.

Do you have a child who:

• Writes with “safe spelling”? In other words, writes short, quick sentences with as few words as possible. Many poor spellers will write a sentence such as “I went to the park. I played ball.” instead of “I went to Scenic Park with my best friend. We found friends from our elementary school and started the best baseball game of my life”.
• Has trouble putting thoughts down in an organized way
• Is a phonetic or a dyslexic speller

Visit www.donjohnston.com for more information about their writing literacy software and learning labs

Students learn to make visual diagrams of paragraphs by brainstorming paragraph formation, and then organizing thoughts into a visual diagram.

Then students can type sentences into the computer. As they type, the sentence is read to them through text to speech. If a word is misspelled, a phonetic dictionary pops up with homonym and spelling support. If a child cannot read the correct word from the predicted list, then the computer can read the words to the child. The child can also access dictionary support while composing.

Using the writing software, students who have trouble generalizing all the components of writing, can finally generalize these skills. Many students spend so much time on ONE component, ex spelling, that they concentrate so hard on the weak skill instead of overall putting every component together to write.

What is a typical result of using this software:

In years of doing evaluations and working on writing literacy, I have seen this software literally make frustrated students immediately have success. A typical child might have a 100 word paragraph, poorly organized, with 35 spelling errors. With minimal training, the typical child can immediately correct the same paragraph to approximately 0 -2 spelling errors