All children, including those with multiple disabilities, should be given an opportunity to include "writing" in their daily routine. As a means of expression, writing may include the use of objects and partial objects to tell about an experience. This can be done by creating a tactile experience story or an object book, in which objects are attached to a page or a board. The objects or partial objects must be meaningful to the child and ideally would have been part of the actually activity (i.e. no cotton balls for clouds!). For example, an outing to a restaurant may include a straw or a napkin glued to page, or handful of popcorn. A coin may be attached to a different page to tell about paying for the snacks. To learn more about their creation, see Language Experience Books and Object Books.
Tangible Symbols
To learn more about Tangible Symbols, see the Perkins Webcast The Use of Tangible Symbols to Support the Development of Communication by Elizabeth Torrey with the accompanying handout or Tangible Symbol Systems Primer by Charity Rowland and Philip Schweigert.
Additional Resources
Focus on Literacy, with Particular Focus on Writing Skills
From Vibrations Newsletter, Colorado Services for Children who are Deafblind
This edited version of the original newsletter includes information about assistive technology, as well as instructional strategies. It includes information on process writing, pairing modeling writing with assistive technology, adapted writing tools, strategies for beginning sentence and paragraph writing, and writing and AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication).
Colby’s Daily Journal: A School-Home Effort to Promote Communication Development
Susan Bruce and Kim Conlon
Teaching Exceptional Children Plus, Volume 2, Issue 1, September 2005
Daily communication journals are a powerful tool to promote communication development in children with severe disabilities. Each page of the daily journal features three parts: a print or braille label, a recording device, and a tangible symbol. Children should participate in both the preparation of the daily journal and its review, thus gaining opportunities to develop associations between important school events and the symbols that represent those events. The review of the daily journal in the home creates opportunities for children to recall school events and to share those events with family members.
Predictable Chart Writing
Center for Literacy and Disability Studies, University of North Carolina
Predictable Chart Writing is a shared, group writing activity that results in a classroom book. Engaging in writing is typically a challenging and often abandoned activity for students with significant disabilities. This writing activity has been adapted for students who are unable to speak and unable to hold a pencil. It has been modified from the activities described in Predictable Chart Writing, by Williams, Carson & Dellosa.
Adult-Student Emergent Writing Interaction Inventory
Center for Literacy and Disability Studies, University of North Carolina
(Adapted from the Adult-Child Interactive Reading Inventory DeBruin-Parecki, 2007, Adapted by Hanser, 8/2009)
Emergent literacy learning is grounded in the rich interactions that students have with others during meaningful literacy activities. Students’ success and engagement in emergent writing is highly dependent on the quality of this interaction. This inventory has the key elements that adults need to do in order for their students to learn how to write using an alternative pencil. The inventory can be used to train teachers, teaching assistants, parents, administrators, literacy coaches, OTRs, SLPs, PTs and after school caregivers. This inventory has been specifically designed for students with significant disabilities, including deaf-blindness.