I see little in teaching the brain with spatial thinking habits to think more sequentially.
Take my family’s experiences in learning to write.
In kindergarten through 2nd grade, almost all writing instruction is presented as various forms of, “Here’s a blank page. Write about what ever you want. Sound out the words, and make sure the capitalize, use a period, and use good spacing between your words!”
This is simply disastrous in my family. My kids freeze up and produce next-to-nothing. Feedback I get from teachers ranges from “he just has so many ideas, he can’t pick one!” to “I tell her over and over that every single sentence begins in a capital and ends in a period, I don’t understand why she doesn’t do it!” to “I wish he would just go back over his work to make it better organized. I keep telling him to start with the main thought.”
I’ve seen this pattern for each of my kids’ teachers, and I see that writing ability gradually improves for most of my kids’ peers through elementary school, so I figure that some of this problem is a difference in how the instruction is structured versus how my kids think. It appears as though that this approach does develop fluency for kids who already have those sequential thinking skills. Because the story is in order in their head, all they have to do is to put it down in order, slowly building up the habits of capitalization and punctuation.
This approach simply doesn’t work for my kids.
Here’s my first hypothesis (hey, I’m a scientist, I’m going to construct a hypothesis):
My kids struggle with writing because they struggle to map their spatial thinking into a logical sequence.
Here’s my second hypothesis:
This logical sequencing is a thinking skill that can be taught.
As any good scientist (ahem, without IRB approval), I’ve recently started experimenting on my son to test these hypotheses. That is, I want to see if I can help him map the spatial thinking into a logical sequence, and to ultimately develop the habit of thought to lay out ideas in a sequential manner. Because writing is primarily a sequential skill, I will know that he’s learning these skills if his writing begins to reflect this sequential thinking. (Ok, ok, it’s not the greatest of tests because N=1, his teachers are still progressing by giving him blank pieces of paper with a short journal prompt, and he’s continuing to mature, and I have no controls. But it’s as good as my experiment is going to get with N=1).
We’ve started with the speech therapist who has talked to him and practiced presuppositional skills. That is, if you want someone to understand what you’re talking about, you have to tell the listener the topic.
We practiced this a lot at home, after which we’ve been able to move to prompting him for the presuppositional information if it’s lacking, and now often he will provide the information when confronted with a confused look.
Recently, we’ve started working with Story Cubes. With a few cartoon-ish pictures, put them into a logical order, and come up with a story linking them that makes sense. This has been hard. Thankfully he likes the crazy stories my husband and I construct enough to keep him taking turns. More details have been forthcoming, but slowly. Soon, I’ll ask him to add some presuppositional information on the outset.
Note that to this point, there is no indication that I’m working on writing skills.
In maybe another month or so, I plan to print out a stack of graphic organizers and have him map out his Story Cube stories on graphic organizers. Graphic organizers, of course, help a child translate a spatial map of an idea into a sequence (be it main idea followed by details, or placing events in order.)
I’m not going to make him write the stories just yet. I just want him to start to see that he can make something up, place it on an organizer, and tell a story from it that makes sense. I’ll even do the scribing for him. I suspect, he will need a lot of regular experience in this step to help teach him how to do this fluently.
Maybe in several months or so, I’ll have him write a favorite story as a gift to a grandparent (it’s amazing what my kids will do to make a gift for a grandparent), and we’ll see if he can transfer the story to the page.
Hopefully I’ll have positive results to report before the next school year starts in 6 months.