alternative pencils – Jane Farrall Consulting

Writing Tools: Sensory Pencils and Early Emergent Writers

Apr 28, 20225 Comments

Recently I was interviewed by Meg Proctor from the Two Sides of the Spectrum Podcast. We talked about lots of different topics around Comprehensive Literacy Instruction including making sure each student has the easiest and most appropriate writing tool. As part of this I mentioned sensory pencils – and a couple of people have messaged

Tools for Writing: a Suggestion and Selection Guide

Jan 30, 201919 Comments

For many of the students I work with, some of whom have complex communication needs and/or relatively limited experiences of generating language, writing presents many challenges. To develop writing skills they need to learn to generate an idea, to think about language, think about the words, the spelling, controlling their “pencil”, etc. For many people,

Using the Developmental Writing Scale for Writing Assessment

Jan 7, 20195 Comments

In my last writing blog post, I talked about using writing data walls to keep track of whole school writing progress – and, of course, each and every individual student’s progress as part of this. The Developmental Writing Scale (Sturm et al 2012) is a key part of this. This scale is so useful as

Emergent Writing: Moving onto Form

Aug 19, 2018

It’s been a big time lapse (sorry!) – but this is the second of a series of blog posts about writing – and about assisting all students to become stronger writers. So moving on from the very beginnings of writing, let’s move to talk about the next stage. Early Emergent Writing: Moving onto Form In

ASSERT Communication and Literacy Conference 2017

Jul 23, 2017

In May I was lucky enough to attend the ASSERT Communication and Literacy Conference in Coventry in the UK. The conference ran for three days – and I promised I would share my presentations on my website. To those who attended – my sincere apologies that it has taken me so long to get this

AGOSCI 2017 Presentations

May 18, 20172 Comments

Today I went to one of my very happy places – an AGOSCI conference. I love AGOSCI. The Australian AAC Community is so inclusive and supportive – and extremely clever! The AGOSCI 2017 conference was fabulous as always – and I’m just sorry that for the first time in 25 years I’m not attending the whole

Keedogo & Keedogo Plus: Custom Keyboards for the iPad

Oct 26, 20145 Comments

Recently Apple released iOS8 – and once again there were a number of accessibility features added with this update. For a round up of accessibility changes and additions check out the excellent summary from AbleNet – iOS8 Accessibility. One of the new features is the ability for developers to create their own onscreen keyboards for

Letter Writing: Writing for Real Reasons

Apr 4, 2014

Writing is a very complex task in literacy. It has many components. Whenever we write, we need to think of an idea, then think of the language to describe the idea, then we need to think of the words and how we spell them – and finally we have to think about how we are

Lots of alternatives – “pencils” for everyone

Dec 19, 201213 Comments

When I first started teaching literacy I focused on teaching reading. At the time, I was working with adults with physical disabilities and writing seemed so hard. None of my class would be able to use a pen or even a keyboard and mouse, which was all I had access to (or so I thought).