Module Six

Activity Two – Reading sample

Many students will escalate behaviorally when faced with reading or writing tasks. They learn that they can reduce the time on task and keep teachers from knowing their lack of facility by getting in trouble. Friends often reward them with social favors for getting the teacher on a tangent or setting up banter so work cannot continue apace.

If reading skills elude a student, try the following:

• Link reading instruction to the student's current conceptual understanding.
• Provide materials that personalize the reading and relate to the student's life.
• Teach reading as pleasurable and interesting, using games and activities that students enjoy.
• Concentrate on successes and what is going well.
• Allow students to find personal methods for solving reading problems and then allow them to teach the tricks to other students.
• Encourage students to use manipulatives such as sports cards, personal notes, computer games, magazines, catalogues of things they find interesting, to enhance depth and rate of learning.
• Find ways to generalize reading and writing to current, every day use of the skills.
• Utilize web and computer skills to involve students in communications, including keyboarding rather than hand writing instruction, use of spell checkers and grammar checkers as standard procedures during communicating, setting up and accessing a personal mail box and subscribing for joke of the day, thought of the day, quote of the day, as well as chat rooms and making greeting cards on the net.

Remember to put some modifications and methods for working on reading in your file system.