Relevant Life Skills Lessons for Struggling Readers and Students with Learning Differences
Keeping middle school and high school students with learning differences or that are struggling readers engaged in practicing reading and writing skills is a familiar challenge to teachers. Explore Your Newspaper was created to motivate and engage these students to reinforce reading comprehension and writing skills, as well as introducing or reviewing the newspaper concept and relating it to a basic academic skill.
This comprehensive program includes lesson plans and activity sheets to help students learn about each section of a newspaper while they practice basic skills. Because of the many types of information in newspapers, including articles, charts, graphs, photographs, comics, and schedules, readers must use a variety of academic skills from several subjects, including reading, writing, math, and geography.
Each worksheet in the lesson includes clear, simple directions along with a visual icon to help students who struggle with reading. Many of the exercises involve situations that middle and high schools students will encounter in the future, such as finding an apartment, interpreting advertisements, and determining what to wear based on weather forecasts. Activities cover specific sections of the newspaper and integrate basic skills, such as locating necessary information, identifying facts and opinions, following a sequence when writing, placing information into categories, and identifying the meanings of abbreviations in classified ads. Most activities require students to find or cut out information from a newspaper and use that text to complete an activity, adding a hands-on component to the program.
Explore Your Newspaper is a flexible program designed to use either as a complete newspaper exploration program or as a fun basic skills supplement to any unit. The sections and most of the lessons can be completed in any order. Several lessons are designed to build on each other and should be taught in the suggested order. An index of skills is provided so that teachers can easily locate lessons that reinforce specific skills.
Because this program was designed for students with learning differences and struggling readers, the materials are already modified to their level of understanding and age appropriateness. Explore Your Newspaper is relevant to everyday life making the articles and activities meaningful and the lessons applicable to building and retaining basic life skills.
In the past month, two events have reminded me of the importance routines play in the lives of children with special needs. At my daughter’s “Meet the Teacher” night, she discovered that the only classmate from kindergarten in her first grade class is a boy with Down’s Syndrome who she befriended last year. He has limited speech and primarily uses gestures to communicate. When he came into the classroom to meet his new teacher, he was completely confused. He had expected that going back to school meant going back to the teacher he had the year before. His mother and the first grade teacher did everything they could to make him feel comfortable, but to him, the new classroom felt “wrong.”