struggling reader » Special Education and Learning Differences

Real Teachers-Real Strategies 11: The Spelling Game

Teaching Tips, Uncategorized No Responses »

Mar 212012

From Manning, SC, we are pleased to share with you our second place PCI/We Are Teachers Teacher Grant Winner, Adela. She is a Resource Teacher for 7th and 8th graders. Adela’s strategy is making spelling a fun activity to keep her students engaged, which in turn strengthens her students’ vocabulary and spelling skills.

The Project: Let’s Learn How to Spell.

Each student thinks of or finds 2 words containing at least 5 letters and is hard to spell. Using Ran Barnes strategies with the “Paper Plate” spelling game, each student writes their words on a paper plate and places them on a table top. Next, a student is chosen to stand in front of the class with their word-plate facing the other students and pronounces their word for the class. The other students then look for the word-plates that have letters that the word in front of them contains. Making this spelling exercise a game helps the students learn new words and how to spell them.

Learning Objectives:

Because the majority of students struggle with spelling and vocabulary, we know that making the task fun to do will improve both spelling and vocabulary.

Materials:

Paper plates, markers or crayons, and “The Differentiated Classroom: Challenging All Students, NOT Dummying Down For Some” by Ran Barnes.

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Brought to you by We Are Teachers partnership with PCI Education’s Teacher Grant Ask: http://www.weareteachers.com/teaching-ideas/grant/teaching-idea?app=17318&grantId=75

Real Teachers-Real Strategies 3: Engaging Reluctant Readers & Writers

Special Education Classroom, Teaching Tips No Responses »

Jan 192012

This post comes from Jennifer in Lima, New York. She is a 1st-2nd grade teacher in Special Education, and her strategy is to help reluctant readers and writers get excited about doing just that: reading and writing!

Her project: Language Experience Stories.

“Students who are not yet excited about reading or who are hesitant to write need a hook. So we made them the characters in the story. I surveyed the children regarding things they like to do. They chose swimming. We created a list of things they did when swimming. I then brought in a blow up swimming pool and other items (floaties, pool toys). We then took pictures of them in the (empty) pool using the item or pretending to swim. From the pictures they wrote their sentences for their stories.”

Learning Objectives:

“Students learned to plan out a story, write their own sentences and then read their story to others. Their confidence grew and they were very proud of their accomplishments. When writing students used a promethean board rather than paper and pencil to make it different for them. Here they were more willing to stretch out the words and were more willing to stay on task.

“The children who created these stories were not enthusiastic about reading or writing prior to writing these stories. During the process they became more involved and excited. Once the story was complete and in their hands they loved it! Not only were they authors who could read their story, they were in the story! They wanted a copy to keep in their classroom and one to have at home. Parents also shared how proud their children were when they brought these stories home.”

Materials:

“With this story it was chart paper, a blow up pool, pool toys, floaties, camera, and a promethean board. Computer and printer were used to create and print the book. With other language experience stories the materials were different depending on the topic that they chose.”

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Brought to you by We Are Teachers partnership with PCI Education’s Teacher Grant Asks: http://www.weareteachers.com/ideas/partnerask/teachingidea?app=16609&grantId=75

Real Teachers Share Real Teaching Techniques That Work

Special Education Classroom, Teaching Tips No Responses »

Dec 132011

PCI Education collaborated with We Are Teachers offering a microgrant to teachers by asking, “Have you ever taught a lesson that really resonated with a special needs student?”

PCI had fabulous responses to our question and we are excited to share with you real ideas from real teachers that work! These teaching techniques will be posted weekly as “Real Teachers-Real Strategies.” Subscribe now to receive these ideas in your inbox for teaching students with special needs.

Our first post is from Cathy in Irving, Texas.

Her strategy: Re-read and Chart It!

I have students re-read the first few pages of a book and we time how many words read in a minute (with the number read listed on the sides of the page.) We subtract any words missed and then chart it on a graph that they keep track of. They do this every day and their wcpm grows and the chart goes up. They are excited to come in and do this activity all on their own each day. When they read their wcpm reading goal, we start on the next page of the book.

Learning Objectives:

Success and independence in reading!

Materials:

Leveled readers, timer, folder, chart/graph paper and a colored pencil to chart with.

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We Are Teachers in partnership with PCI Education’s Teacher Grant Asks: http://www.weareteachers.com/ideas/partnerask/teachingidea?app=16857&grantId=75

Struggling Reader Series: Identifying Letters

Teaching Tips 5 Responses »

Dec 152009

by Kristi Lindsay

My four year old, Jadon, struggled with writing lower case “b” and “d”. “Which way does ‘b’ go and which was does ‘d’ go?” he asked. He can say their names, knows their sounds, and can match them up with their uppercase letters. But, sometimes, he gets the two confused. bread

Have you ever noticed how similar some of the lowercase letters are? Look at “b” and “d” or “p” and “q”. Or how about lower case “h”, “n”, and “m”? As a teacher, I remember how my struggling readers had a hard time identifying these letters. They could say the letters’ names, sounds, and even write them in isolation, but often got them confused when reading or used the wrong one by accident as a letter reversal when writing.

I figured there had to be a way to help him remember which letter is “b” and which is the “d”. Then it hit me: bread and drink! I remembered an afternoon talk show episode that discussed a simple way to identify which “bread” and which “drink” were ours at a formal table setting. “Bread on the left and drink on the right,” said the host as she held up her left hand with pointer and thumb in the shape of a circle and three other fingers together pointing up like the shape of a “b” for “bread.” Her right hand was the opposite in the shape of a “d” for “drink.” While the simple hand gestures helped me identify my bread and drink, I also realized the “b” and “d” could help my son.

Try it: make a “b” with your left hand and “d” with your right hand. They are in alphabetical order when held up in front of you! Silly and simple? Yes, but since sharing the “b” and “d” hand trick with Jadon, I often see him holding up his hands and saying “a, b, c, d,” accenting the “b” and “d” with his hands.

Struggling readers can’t sound out words if they can’t recognize the letters in the words. Providing these little reminders gives them tools to be better readers. If your child struggles to identify letters, come up with silly visuals to help him or her remember them. It can be as easy or as silly as “b for bread and d for drink!”

Say It, Rhyme It, Spell It

Teaching Tools No Responses »

Nov 102009

Emergent Readers and Struggling Readers Have Fun Learning and Discover Reading Success

Say It, Rhyme It, Spell It is an engaging game, made in two levels, that helps emerging readers and struggling readers become familiar with words that follow a consonant-vowel-consonant (c-v-c) pattern. The reproducible worksheets binder can be used in conjunction with the board game, as a stand-alone program or supplement to another reading program. Say It, Rhyme It, Spell It Software offers picture representations of words as well as words without pictures for visual learners and students with developmental disabilities to reinforce the foundation and skills needed to begin reading and strengthen the reading skill process.

Playing the interactive board game or software game helps struggling learners develop phonological awareness. Students begin to understand individual sounds apart from words, how sounds form words, how words begin and end, and how to recognize parts and patterns of words. Once students recognize the parts and patterns of words and associate them with the letters of the alphabet, they begin to equate sounds with symbols. This is the beginning of reading. By playing these games, students improve their phonological awareness and learn to recognize, identify, spell, and rhyme c-v-c words with the most common letter patterns.

Say It, Rhyme It, Spell It 1 & 2 both consist of a game board and 150 draw cards. The game board features 28 squares. Each square has an icon to represent one of the possible tasks to complete during the game. As a student lands on a square, he or she selects a draw card from the appropriate stack and completes the designated task: saying a word, rhyming a word, or spelling a word. Say It, Rhyme It, Spell It 2 progresses in difficulty from the first board game by using c-v-c-c and c-c-v-c short vowel word patterns.

Say It, Rhyme It, Spell It is appropriate for a wide variety of classrooms, including specialized reading programs, language arts, resource, inclusive, and ESL classrooms. These easy-to-play games help students learn to read c-v-c, c-v-c-c and c-c-v-c short vowel word pattern words and establish the foundation or reinforcement of reading skills for emergent readers, struggling readers, and students with specials needs and learning differences.

To encourage parental involvement and reinforcement of emerging reading skills at home, reproducible activities and a parent letter are included. These take-home activities provide an easy way for students to practice saying, rhyming, and spelling words.

Product Developed and Authored by Rosie Simms

Make It Real: Explore Your Newspaper

Special Education Classroom No Responses »

Oct 292009

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.

Character Education, Lasting Effects

Special Education Classroom No Responses »

Oct 022009

A Curriculum That Builds Character and Reading Comprehension Skills

Character education has long been a shared responsibility of parents, teachers and members of the community throughout history. It is a learning process that should be exemplified in a school community to help students understand, care about and act on such core ethical values as respect, justice, civic virtue and citizenship, and responsibility for self and others. These core values serve as the foundation of our society.

Whether a student has learning disabilities, developmental disabilities, or special needs, developing a strong character is essential to everyone. It affects developing good behavior skills and social skills as well. Because students spend much of their day in classrooms, teachers have an opportunity to explain and reinforce core values upon which character is formed.

Character education must be approached comprehensively to include the emotional, intellectual and moral qualities of a person or group. We must offer multiple opportunities for students to learn about, discuss and enact positive social behaviors so that being a person of strong character becomes a part of a student’s beliefs and actions. We must practice character for it to have a lasting effect.

PCI Education has designed a curriculum that provides diverse activities to develop character, practice positive behavior skills, and build reading comprehension called Bugg Books. These books infuse important life skills into engaging tales and entice struggling readers. As the main characters in each book work through everyday situations, they learn the value of good citizenship and having a strong character. The Bugg Books character lessons include:

• getting along with others
• learning to share
• practice makes perfect
• dealing with bullies
• respecting others
• sticking to the truth
• facing your fears
• paying attention
• doing your best
• consequences of stealing
• the trouble with tattling
• believing in yourself
• controlling your anger

Teaching character education along with reading comprehension skills is easy with the Bugg Books. The curriculum features two distinct lessons and exercises for each of the books in the series. The first lesson focuses on reading comprehension. The second lesson focuses on the character education lesson of the book with a wide variety of activities to specifically engage students in the lesson, extend it to their own everyday situations, and make personal connections. The curriculum also includes activities that families can do at home to reinforce each lesson.

Students with special needs, learning differences, or developmental disabilities can also evolve in character education, understand social values and learn positive behavior skills. It is vitally important we instill core values in all our children so they, too, can embody and teach the next generation a strong sense of character, values, and citizenship.

Within the character of the citizen lies the welfare of the nation. — Cicero

Special Education is PCI’s Specialty

Special Education Classroom No Responses »

Sep 102009

Academic Materials Tailored to a Variety of Special Needs

2008 PCILogoNew by Kristina M. Swann

Several years ago, I jumped at the chance to write curriculum and other materials for PCI Education. Previously, as a special education teacher, I had spent hours modifying materials for my students. At PCI, I had the opportunity, along with other former teachers, to create curriculums and worksheets that feature a variety of modifications for students with special needs. We have the unique opportunity to create materials tailored to these students so teachers in the field did not have to go through the extensive modifications on their own any longer.

In my role as teacher, the modifications most frequently included:
• enlarging the font of a textbook page or worksheet
• shortening assignments
• providing study guides so students will know what information they need to know
• testing only on the most important information

I’m sure many of you can relate that these modifications needed to be accomplished without resulting in pages that look babyish or too different from what other students were using, which is not an easy task. However at PCI Education, the art directors and graphic designers know how to make materials easy to read without being juvenile.

To encompass the variety of special needs and learning differences, PCI’s products are specifically written to these students’ needs to facilitate learning in an inclusion classroom or special ed classroom in these ways:
• Written at a lower reading level to accommodate struggling readers
• Are printed in 14-point font
• Have worksheets that are pleasing to the eye and not visually confusing
• Questions are broken up into blocks of 5 questions at a time
• Limiting choices in a word bank
• Including crossword puzzles that are fun but also provide clues to exercise critical thinking skills
• Include worksheets that also serve as study guides for the quizzes and tests. Each worksheet tells students on which corresponding student text page they can find the answer.
• Created to have no surprises on tests and quizzes. Each test question comes from the worksheet pages, and all test and quiz questions have been answered before in a different format.

For example, a true/false question that appeared on a worksheet might appear on the test as a multiple-choice question, like the example below.

1. Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States during the Civil War.
• True or False?

1. ________________ was President of the United States during the Civil War.
• A. Abraham Lincoln
• B. George Washington
• C. George Bush
• D. John F. Kennedy

At PCI, our goal is to make it as easy as possible for students to learn and retain the information presented in our student texts. PCI Education prides itself on creating materials that meet academic standards for students with special needs, struggling readers and struggling learners, students with learning differences, and students with intellectual or developmental disabilities.

Getting the Words Right

Teaching Tips 1 Response »

Aug 242009

Vocabulary Tactics in an Inclusive Classroom by Kristina Swann

We know that learning vocabulary is an essential first step to learning anything. Obviously, students must learn vocabulary while learning to read, but they must also learn vocabulary for every subject they study. Each subject comes with its own vernacular. Without basic knowledge of the vocabulary of a topic, understanding the subject would be hard at best, but vocabulary can be especially challenging for special needs children and students with autism or those with learning differences.

In today’s inclusiveclassrooms, vocabulary development is more important than ever before. There is a growing number of students with learning differences and special needs challenges and students who are English language learners.

These are some things I used while teaching and reinforcing vocabulary in my inclusive classroom:

• Use multiple methods of review and reinforcement of terms. Students can match terms to definitions, sort terms into categories, or identify the correct term from a list of choices.

• Practice vocabulary in a fun way. For example, play vocabulary bingo with your students. You can also turn reviews into a rhyming game or a sing-along. Depending on the age of your students, they could even be engaged to make their own song or rap to remember the words.

• Make vocabulary visual. Put up a word wall. Students will be able to see the vocabulary words every day when they walk into the classroom. If you have a few extra minutes between lessons or at the end of a class, call on volunteers to define words from the word wall or put them in sentences. Reward students for answering correctly.

• Use technology. Instructional software programs are a fantastic way to provide extra practice to students who need it most.

• Use the words. Once you have taught students a vocabulary word, use it. For example, if you have taught students the word “subtract,” don’t use the phrase “take away” anymore when teaching about subtraction. Say “subtract” every time you address the topic.

• Get students to own their vocabulary words. Have students make up definitions in their own words. Have them write words in sentences and draw pictures to represent the words and their definitions. Letting students take control of the words while they are learning them allows students to keep those words with them for the long term.

Reading & Writing Success in Small Steps

Teaching Tips 1 Response »

Jul 012009

Using Word Families to Build Confidence in Struggling Readers

Many struggling readers feel successful when they can apply their knowledge of words and word parts they do know to read other unknown words. Word families help students recognize unknown words by using word-structure patterns or phonograms. Short-vowel pattern families like –am, –in, or –up can especially help struggling readers gain confidence and a solid word foundation that they can carry over to writing skills and other subjects.

The following activities are designed to help those with learning differences read and write words in word families. These exercises will also reinforce comprehension and students’ confidence that they can apply this reading skill to many areas of learning.

Blending Words. Choose a word pattern to focus on. Write the word pattern, like –an, five or six times in a column on the board, leaving a blank in front of the pattern. Introduce the pattern then ask students to read the pattern. After writing letters in the spaces to make words, ask students to identify the sound the letter or letters make preceding the pattern of the first word. Say the beginning sound together and then blend it into the pattern using your finger to underline the letters as you blend the sounds together to read the word. Finally, read the word and have the students repeat the word.

Making Words in the Word Family. Choose a word pattern and word, then write the word pattern on five index cards in one color. On another set of index cards, write the beginning letter or letters for each word in a different color. Have students match the different cards to make all of the words in the word family. When all of the words have been made, ask the students read them out loud.

Finding Word Family Words. Choose a word pattern and write it on the board. Have students brainstorm a list of words that are a part of the word family and write them on the board. Then give students a newspaper, magazine, and junk mail. Ask them look through the texts and cut out words that belong in the word family. After the activity, have students share the words they found. Explain that they can read these unknown words because they can read the short-vowel pattern in the word family by sounding out the sounds of the beginning letters.

Success in small steps gives struggling readers and students with learning differences confidence in themselves and their ability to learn. This confidence builds a foundation to grow other life skills essential to becoming successful young adults.

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