Every year, I find I spend time creating custom resources for different writers I am privileged to work with. I truly believe that every writer has an appropriate writing tool – and sometimes we just need to spend time figuring out what that tool might be. It’s really important that the writing tool minimises the physical demands of writing so that writers can focus on the cognitive side – and for many of the students that I work with this is of huge importance as tasks which demand a high level of motor control (e.g. handwriting) can become a barrier to them learning other skills (e.g. spelling) because they are expending all their energy on the motor task.
So, I have just spent some time updating the writing tools I have available for download from https://comprehensiveliteracy.com/writing-tools/ with the new resources I’ve made in 2025. If you need some more information about which tool and why, please see the blog posts Writing Tools to Download, Share and Customise and Tools for Writing 2024 Style.
All of these resources are non-electronic writing tools, and there are two main groups. Flip Charts for emergent writers and Keyboards for transitional and conventional writers.
If you go to either the flip charts or keyboards section, you will see that they are divided up according to student need. There are flip charts for students who point, flip charts for students who use eye gaze, etc. A couple of years ago I started making “themed” flip charts – and you’ll see a number of these. I think of these similar to the “cool” writing tools that other kids use – like the ones that have a scent or are packaged in an enticing way. They aren’t going to magically make the student a better writer, but they often help to engage the student in writing a little more for a short period of time. Plus, they look nice and I LOVE things that look nice and I’m sure other people do too!!
Finally, most of the writing tools also have an option to customise and make them your own. I make all of these in Canva and I have now shared them as Canva templates. So, if you click on the Canva Template for a writing tool, you will have an option to save it as your own file and then customise it. So, if you want different coloured letters or to have it fit on US Letter Paper, then you can do that!
Have fun writing as always 🙂
