Neuroscience+and+Learning+for+Students+with+Writing+Challenges

Neuroscience and Learning Assignment Laurie, Erryn, Penny

__**Our Learner:**__ Our student is a 4th grader who has difficulty writing due to challenges organizing ideas, remaining and expanding on the topic. At the end of the school year, he will be taking the MCAS Long composition assessment. The assessment requires writing at least a 3-paragraph personal-narrative composition. At this time, he is unable to write a well-organized paragraph essay.

Through research on the Neuroscience articles, we have learned that a multi–disciplined teaching approach is the most beneficial. It shows that the targeted learning activities should be stimulating, novel and pertain to the student’s interests. As stated in the article The Neuroscience of Joyful Education, “Students retain what they learn when the learning is associated with strong positive emotions.” The attached links will help keep our student involved, reduce anxiety and stress through fun and interesting interfaces. They will also motivate our student to stay on task and complete his goals.
 * __Readings:__**

We located several resources that might assist our student with his writing organization. The tool for writing prompts that we found is “Scholastic Story Starters”. This tool gives students a fun way to choose a writing prompt of interest. It has several setting to choose ability level. It has an interactive and engaging site with colorful graphics and sound effects.
 * __Resources:__**

http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/storystarters/storystarter1.htm



For organizing the student’s thoughts we found the “Read-Write-Think” webbing tool. It allows the student to create a graphic organizer. It uses shapes and color-coding to organize main and supporting details.

http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/student-interactives/readwritethink-webbing-tool-30038.html





We also found an alternate option to working on the net with graphic organizers. “Educationworld.com” has many downloadable graphic organizer templates that open in Microsoft Word. They are directly editable within the template.

http://www.educationworld.com/tools_templates/index.shtml#graphicOrganizers



We used Titan Pad for the drafting and collaborative editing with the teacher. Once the student has created a draft the teacher can review it and highlight any areas that need attention and correction.The teacher and the student can write and edit in different colors. The teacher can also see the progress of the student's work.

http://www.titanpad.com