Writing: Since the purpose of writing is to express thoughts, words, and deeds, etc., the process of writing and the understanding of that process is more important than the product of the writing itself. In other words, when teaching children to write, we are also teaching them to use language, to sequence events, to understand positional concepts and conventions of print. Children learn by doing; therefore, we must encourage their efforts, even when we can't exactly read what they have written. Writing entails so many skills! Children must have fine motor coordination and strength, a good visual memory, an understanding that spoken words can be represented by written symbols, an environment in which reading and writing are valued, etc., but what they REALLY need to have are lots of opportunities to practice writing skills.
Representational drawing is a precursor to writing. But many children with disabilities don't attempt to draw. Guided drawing is a good way to help children understand that they can represent a story with pictures or letters.
Handwriting: Children experiencing difficulties in school may also have problems with handwriting. Our favorite handwriting program in the resource room is called Handwriting without tears. It was developed by an occupational therapist, Jan Z. Olsen. We have had a lot of success teaching or remediating letter and number formation with this program. It provides excellent memory strategies, or mnemonics, to help children remember how letters are formed and gives terrific visual cues that aid in understanding how to write. For more information about this program, you can e mail the author:
Below is a description of the way we teach writing capital letters, using Handwriting without tears.
All you need are combinations of these pieces to make any capital letter. (It's best to teach capital letters first because they all start from the top and are all the same height. There are fewer capital letters that look similar to each other, but many lower-case letters are similar to each other and tend to cause confusion, such as p,b,d,g,q,t,f,u,n.) We call them "big line, little line, big curve, little curve". We cut ours out of placemats. We use plain chalk board slates to put the pieces on. Some letters are middle starters and some are corner starters, so we put a sticker in the middle and one in the left corner at the top.
Steps:
1.Child makes A with letter pieces.
2. Adult writes A. 
3.
Child erases, using wet sponge.
4. Child dries letter with dry
sponge.
5. Child writes letter.
A large part of writing involves motor planning. "Making" the letter helps children figure out how a letter should be written. Erasing the letter the teacher has written trains a child's brain to coordinate his hand movements.
