Sentence Building Rods

[MyCalling]

My 10yo dsd is years behind in writing skills and her sentence structure is horrible. I'm also pretty certain she's dyslexic, but she hasn't been tested. Do you think sentence building Reading Rods will do enough to help with basic sentence structure without needing a curriculum to teach it?

[Michelle T]

and also some cards with "lessons" on them. At least, the rods I had came with those things. It's been a few years, so I can't remember for sure if they came as a package, or I ordered each part separately.

I had the sentence building rods. They seemed like they would be great, but for my very NONvisual learner, they were just confusing and distracting.

I never had a full curriculum with the rods, and it was fairly easy to come up with ideas.
Michelle T

[MyCalling]

I was thinking about using them as her only "free writing" since she used Writing Strands 3 last year and did various writing on animals and almost every sentence was confusing and incorrect.

I'm debating on using PLL and copy work for learning language then word blocks or magnets for constructing her own sentences so I can oversee and correct her as she forms them. Then have her write them down (she needs a lot of handwriting practice also).

[Kathy in MD]

What helped my then 13 yo ds was Sentence Composing for Elementary School. It has the student immitating good, published authors and starts by "chunking" sentences. The sentences are complex, so you may want to take it slowly, maybe expanding on the chunking portion. All you need is the student book, about $20 from Amazon.

I'm not familiar with Reading Rods, but my ds had been in Montessori and used their manipulatives for writing and parsing sentences. The problem was, he needed practice in immitating good models since he had struggled with language problems for years.