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Response to Danielle Fisher from Emily Dunn

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Response to Danielle Fisher from Emily Dunn

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Danielle, I've just been moved from teaching 8th grade Social Studies and Science instructional classes to Language Arts and Lit & Comp next year. I'm excited to hear your support of the Wilson program and the benefit it has for your students!

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Literacy is vital because it is apart of the community we want our students to be independent/contributing members of. The students I work with now in resource benefit from graphic organizers and scaffolded instruction based off the general education lesson plans. While our school has been making a recent push towards including more contemporary, diverse literature into our Language Arts curriculum (thank you, Jason Reynolds), our Literature and Composition classes still use mentor texts that are outdated or unrelated to our student's lives and could use more materials to help draw our students in.

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I love the idea of an evolving library. There are so many good pieces of literature being made that address culture, diversity, and acceptance. There is always opportunities to be addressing important topics through literature. Whether we are reading the books aloud, or having them available for students, either option communicates our ideas and values, and we need to show each student that they are valuable.

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Literacy is vital because it is all around us. Reading well and with understanding doesn't just help a student pass English, it helps in all other subjects too.
I work with a lot of students with memory problems and find repetition is one of the most useful tools I have when promoting literacy. Since I teach high school, outside of my classroom, there is not much literacy instruction that happens. We have discussed often about how we need to reincorporate more literacy instruction, but have not come up with a plan to do so. I think we could really benefit if we worked together across classes to promote literacy. The students are very social and love to be together. This can be a great tool for literacy, as they love to share about themselves. We use many games and activities where students write about themselves and then read about a friend and guess who they are reading about. This promotes social development as well as literacy skills.

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I like the idea of using a graphic organizer while reading. You think of them only being used when writing but I think this would be great for students to be able to break down what they are reading. Graphic organizers have been huge for my middle school students when it comes to writing. They need the structure of filling in each section.

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In Special Education we use the Wilson Reading Program. I think that breaking down each part of reading is a huge part of helping with learning disability. Students need to hear how to appropriately say a sound or word. Students also need hands on activities to help them understand and keep focus. You could use books that relate to the students when reading aloud. You can pull out words that you used in your direct teaching and say what letters are in this word? You could show them examples throughout the building and ask them where they go that they see words similar to that.

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Response to Emily Ross from Blayne Dixon

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Response to Emily Ross from Blayne Dixon

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Emily, I like that you use tactile and kinesthetic strategies for helping your students practice their phonics skills. Not only does it provide differentiated instruction for a variety of learners, it sounds really fun too! I also like how you mentioned that you have your students set goals for themselves to go back and reflect on. I think that making the students stakeholders in their own progress is a great way to motivate and encourage.

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Literacy instruction is so important for students of all grade levels. As you mentioned in your presentation, literacy is everywhere, and it is a skill that is only built upon as students move through each grade level. Because of the scaffolding needed, it is crucial to lay a strong foundation. In my classroom I use graphic organizers to help students gather information from primary source documents and use it to support thesis statements. I take a few days at the beginning of each school year to lay the framework for the graphic organizers and it is something we practice regularly. I think my school could improve upon its culturally responsive practices, such as choosing texts in English classes that reflect several different cultures, or including the background knowledge of our students into our lessons in a more intentional way.

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Andrea, I really enjoyed reading how you link your students' interests to literacy. We know that reading things of little interest to you is not enjoyable. Therefore, the best way to get our students excited to read and and learn is through relevance. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

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I like your idea of incorporating resume writing into your high school classes! That is a very practical skill that will help them down the road.

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Literacy is very important because students encounter words and text everywhere they go. In my classroom, I use multimodal approaches when it comes to literacy instruction. I use tactile and kinesthetic approaches to help students develop basic phonics skills. I would like to incorporate more graphic organizers into my lessons to help students develop higher level comprehension skills. I could represent my students' lives in my instruction by incorporating their interests into the lessons. I also like to have students make goals for themselves so that they can see the importance of continuing to grow and learn new skills.

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I struggle with stressing the importance of reading. Some of students are 15 and completely opposed to reading because for years they have not gotten it. It hasn't clicked. Like everyone has mentioned literacy is very important to success. I try to incorporate his interests such as food to get him more engaged rather than shutting down. I struggle to motivate my students.

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I teach practical literacy since I teach High School Life Skills. For some students, we focus on reading menus, reading street signs or building signs, reading nutritional guidelines. I have found teaching in isolation with sight words has been the most effective for my students with learning disabilities. When teaching main idea, I have been using a lot of graphic organizers to help them look in the text. I could benefit on improving my vocabulary instruction since I find it very hard to teach with the high level of needs in my classroom. They get very bored with vocabulary occasionally and sometimes I fight more behaviors teaching it. I try to teach them functional reading in their environment depending on their needs. I also try to spark their interests for example giving my student readings about Mario Kart to help him stay engaged.

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Bringing in real-life literacy is something I need to do more often for my students. I have been looking for strategies to incorporate this into my daily lessons. Also, I agree students are more apt to learn if they can gain an income from it. My students talk about making money everyday.

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Lauren, I love how you encourage your students with choice! That is such a great strategy. Not having a reading curriculum in place can be challenging. I will keep my fingers crossed for you for next year. Florida Center for Reading Research has some awesome materials for literacy instruction. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

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Literacy instruction is so important because, like you mentioned, literacy is everywhere. Job applications, paperwork to complete, resumes and cover letters, directions to put together furniture and so much more. Reading comprehension my be frustrating for students to learn, but when reading the directions to put together a chair it is important to understand what you are reading, and not just read to say the words correctly. I use graphic organizers all the time with my students at the high school level. They greatly help with reading comprehension and writing organization. I could bring resume and cover letter writing into my literacy instruction as well as reading to understand important paperwork my students will need later in life.

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Tara, I have never heard of the green, yellow, and red light strategy before. I love this method because you are giving the students the prompt they need to figure out an answer to a question. My students struggle with the "yellow" and "red" questions because they are very impulsive. This is something I would use so they understand some questions we need to slow down and think. I use a lot of graphic organizers in my classroom and they are very beneficial. It gives the students a model to use when I work with them, they have to think, and then they are also writing their thoughts.

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Effective literacy instruction is beneficial to education and the lives of students with SLD because it is something we use every day of our lives. I have students in my classroom who get very discouraged with reading because a lot of aspects within literacy are hard for them. I have found that if you give them a choice of what they want to read it makes things a lot easier. A piece of advice I received, was to not level your library, but to organize it by genre. This is because a student should have the ability to choose any book they want to read even if its too hard because they are reading. There will always be words they can read or other aspects of literacy you can use with the book of their choice. Our school does not have a reading curriculum put into place, so it has been difficult for myself to teach. Next school year, we are taking the Balanced Literacy Approach, and fingers crossed, are buying Fountas and Pinnell. I also want to start doing daily read aloud and mini lessons and once a month focus on a new background or culture. I think this will be very beneficial for my students to learn about each others different backgrounds.

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I really like how you use the green, yellow and red light system to help your students answer comprehension questions. I teach 4th-6th grade resource so I will definitely add that tool to next year's instruction! I think this could also be applied in writing instruction when responding to what they read. Thanks for the awesome tip!!

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Effective literacy instruction is beneficial to the education and lives of students with specific learning disabilities because no matter what they do in life they need the ability to read. Whether it's an email from a boss, a menu at a restaurant, or sending a text message to someone they are using reading skills. This is something I frequently do in my classroom when students get discouraged as they're reading, or say that school isn't important. I remind them that they are reading all of the time and they have to be able to do it. I also try to reflect my students in my library with books I read aloud to the students, or articles that include topics of interest. It is hard to listen or understand something that you don't relate to or care about, so I try where I can to hook them in as readers. Our school as a whole works hard to show books as windows, mirrors and doors for our students. Teachers display "hot reads" to show the kids what new book they are reading and what they enjoy. I think my library will be always evolving to reflect what is going on in my students' lives, and in the world around us.

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Garrick, I think it is so important to mix real life experiences with the books you are reading. I teach K-2 grade, but I would imagine that it can be difficult at times to engage high school students into the reading material. Naturally everyone is more interested in a topic if it relates to them personally. This is something I should try to incorporate more with my students as well. Thanks for sharing your ideas!

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Garrick, I think it is awesome that you incorporate real world examples of literacy into your instruction for your high schoolers. You are so right that students at that age are more likely to engage or learn something new if they know they can use the skill to benefit themselves in their future. Showing students that they can use literacy for something like a job application is great!

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Literacy is a part of our everyday lives. If a child is unable to read, they are not going to struggle in life. It is our jobs to ensure that we are providing students with the best instruction possible so they can learn and grow. Reading comprehension is something that my kids really struggle with. Sitting and listening to a story is hard enough for them, let alone answering questions about it. Something that works for my students is focusing on the pictures in a book. After we read a book, I have the kids draw pictures that pertain to the book. After that, I have the kids show their pictures to a peer and use them to retell the story. This works for my verbal students, but for my nonverbal kids we mainly focus on looking at the pictures. For example, "Look! It's Curious George! Look what he is doing! He is climbing on a telephone pole! Uh oh! The man in the yellow hat doesn't look happy!" Basically we try to narrate the story for them through pictures. Something my school does as a whole, is cover the school in pictures of our favorite books, of us reading books, of parents reading books, and of the kids reading books. The idea is to show them that everyone in their lives is reading in hopes that this encourages them to want to read too.

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Effective literacy instruction is beneficial to the education and lives of students with SLDs because literacy is necessary in every day life. Like mentioned in the presentation, literacy is necessary to order off of a menu in a restaurant, reading signs while driving, reading instructions, and communicating with people. I use a variety of comprehension strategies in my classroom to support my students during instruction. I use the green, yellow, red light questioning strategy during instruction to help my 4th grade students comprehend what we read in class. Green light questions means the student can "go" directly to the text to find the answer. Yellow light questions mean the students needs to slow down and look in more than one place in the text to find the answer. Red light questions means the students have to stop and think about what they read and what they know because the answer is not directly in the text. This strategy gives the students great practice with finding evidence to support their answer and experience with leveled questions. I definitely need to use graphic organizers more in my instruction. I was not aware of how important graphic organizers are for students with SLDs and how they can help support comprehension. I will definitely be implementing them in my instruction from now on. You can represent students lives into instruction by relating your instruction to their lives. For example, when you are reviewing background information before reading make sure to ask students questions that require them to dig into their personal experiences.

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Sierra, thank you for sharing on your engaging literacy practices within your classroom. I love how you incorporated your student's interests into literacy. That is such an excellent strategy.

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Effective literacy instruction is beneficial to education and the lives of students with specific learning disabilities. In my classroom now, I feel as if I am always trying to stress the importance of reading to my students. I am always trying to connect reading to their real world experiences. For example, if students are unable to read, getting a paying job in the future will become a very difficult task. The other day, I was able to connect literacy to my students life by having her read the directions on how to draw a panda. My student loves to draw, therefore, I was able to have her read a passage on the steps in order to draw a panda bear. Not only did this activity increase her engagement. It also allowed her to see that reading is everywhere and in order to do the things that she loves, being able to read is key. An effective literacy instruction practice that I use in my classroom is the multimodal practice. In my classroom, I am always trying to have my students learn the material through hands on approaches. For example, while learning their sight words, we first say them, then we write them in sand and then we sky write them.

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Literacy skills build from grade to grade as student progresses through the education system. To be successful throughout their educational career, students must gain and maintain literacy skills. Upon completion of high school, students apply these skills within their chosen career path. I like to use a multimodal practice within my classroom. I present written work digitally on a smart board, paper copies are provided for students to have at their desks, and either I or a student volunteer reads aloud. I typically reinforce concepts with a short video or hands on activity when possible. Tactile, at least at the grade levels I have instructed at. I have experience in middle school and high school. I like to bring "real world" literacy into the classroom, such as job applications and other forms students will need to generalize as they exit the school system. I have found that high school students are more apt to learn a new skill if it can get them paid.

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Effective literacy instruction is beneficial in education & student lives with specific learning disabilities since literacy is used in every aspect of our lives. Reading & writing is a key component to many parts of their lives. It goes beyond being able to read & write, but also able to understand meaning, creating, & even effectively communicating. One effective literacy practice I see in my school/classroom is using evidence based practice. Our intervention & curriculums are strong evidenced based practices. Our ELA curriculum uses a multi-modal approach. We use many different kinds of learning with auditorial, visual, & tactile. Our readings are paired with visuals, read aloud, background summary before reading, etc. The pairs of visual, text, & auditory is great for students in general & more specifically students with learning disabilities. I should utilize graphic organizers more when reading. I implement them often with writing but think they would also be beneficial with reading more often. It will help students build a better understand & comprehension of what they are reading.