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Learning Disabilities from a CHILD'S PERSPECTIVE

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Learning Disabilities from a CHILD'S PERSPECTIVE

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This is a video that allows a student to share her experiences and thoughts about having a learning disability.

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Shedding Light on Learning Disabilities: Sophie Ghauri at TEDxYouth@ISASDuchesneAcademy

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This article discusses for teachers can make a difference on a daily basis for the students who have learning difficulties or disabilities. Check out the four lessons that you could use in your classroom!

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Karen Goepen-Wee grew up in a family of 'makers' and problem-solvers. Now, this solution-oriented mindset helps her students with learning disabilities. For her TED-Ed Innovation Project, Goepen-Wee created a digital collection of resources that she finds useful for her students, their teachers, and their parents. This collection, called LearnAbilities, provides accurate, teacher-approved information about topics such as anxiety and executive function in the classroom. Below is Goepen-Wee's recap of the project - and her wish for every teacher of students with learning disorders:

As an educator, you are much more effective when you have immediate access to the tools and information you need. Yet one of the most time-consuming aspects of an educator's job is research. Now that I am a teacher of students with learning challenges, I not only look for content, I also look for strategies, tactics and professional resources. My project goal was to create a well-researched series of TED-Ed lessons that document the tools that I have found effective, with a wealth of information in the "Think" and "Dig Deeper" sections of each lesson. Here are 4 lessons that teachers can use to make a difference in their classrooms on a daily basis:

I hope that teachers take these lessons, use them, share them and customize them. I would love to see what resources and changes they make.

As a teacher of kids with learning disabilities, sometimes I find myself only focusing upon the child's disability and not their ability. Every child can learn, and often it is because of their other abilities that learning takes place. My wish for every teacher of students with learning disabilities is that we enable children to access and use their learning abilities. To support that goal, I created LearnAbilities, an ongoing blog that includes these 4 lessons and more ways to support students and teachers with diverse learning needs.

Closing thoughts:

Every school has a challenge that they need to solve. By employing design thinking, an entire staff, a department or an individual teacher can design a solution for that problem. TED-Ed Select Lessons are a great way to represent the learning or solutions that a teacher creates for their particular challenge!
This article is part of the TED-Ed Innovation Project series, which highlights 25+ TED-Ed Innovation Projects designed by educators, for educators, with the support and guidance of the TED-Ed Innovative Educator program. You are welcome to share, duplicate and modify projects under this Creative Commons license to meet the needs of students and teachers.

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What every teacher needs to know about students with learning disabilities

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Karen Goepen-Wee grew up in a family of 'makers' and problem-solvers. Now, this solution-oriented mindset helps her students with learning disabilities. For her TED-Ed Innovation Project, Goepen-Wee created a digital collection of resources that she finds useful for her students, their teachers, and their parents.

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Reading is the key to all learning. Reading is the most important skill that a child will learn. This article provides tips to help the students develop fluency and reflective reading.

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Learning Disabilities Association of America

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Reading is the single most important educational skill your students will learn. Understanding the organization and meaning of text and instruction in both phonics and literature is essential to helping young children read. By understanding the prerequisite skills for reading, teachers can build a solid foundation for their students to learn and succeed in school. Here are some ways to create appreciation of the written word, develop awareness of printed language, teach the alphabet, develop phonological and phonemic awareness, teach the relation of sounds and letters, teach children how to sound out words and to spell words, and help children develop fluent, reflective reading.
Create Appreciation of the Written Word

Share stories with children and invite them to explore a story's magic.

Share informational texts and invite children to wonder about the new ideas presented.

Take every opportunity to point out the ways in which reading is essential to the communications of everyday life (e.g., on labels, instructions, and signs).

Develop Awareness of Printed Language and the Writing System

Make sure students know how books are organized. They should be taught the basics about books-that they are read from left to right and top to bottom, that print may be accompanied by pictures or graphics, that the pages are numbered, and that the purpose of reading is to gain meaning from the text and understand ideas that words convey.

Read to children from books with easy-to-read large print. Use stories that have predictable words in the text.

Use "big books" to help children notice and learn to recognize words that occur frequently, such as a, the, is, was, and you.

Label objects in your classroom.

Teach the Alphabet

A strong predictor of the ease with which a child learns to read is his or her familiarity with letters of the alphabet. This familiarity is a critical building block for learning to read.

It is important to go beyond knowing the names of letters. Students must also develop a sense of the purpose of letters.

Help them notice the letters in the print that surrounds them and that you share with them every day.

Engage the students in activities that will help them learn to recognize letters visually.

Help students learn to form the letters and encourage them to embellish their work with their names and with other first attempts at writing.

Develop the Students' Phonological Awareness

In listening and speaking, we pay attention to the meaning of language rather than to its sound. To learn to read, however, students must be taught to attend to the sounds, or phonology, of language. This is necessary for them to understand how speech is represented by print. Children with learning disabilities need special help in learning to develop such phonological awareness.

Model and demonstrate how to break short sentences into individual words. For example, use the sentence "Frogs eat bugs," and demonstrate with chips, cards, or other manipulatives how the sentence is made up of three words and how the order of the words matters. Using manipulatives to make sentences, play with each word and put it in order.

Develop students' awareness of the sounds of individual words by asking them to clap out syllables and to listen for and generate rhymes.

Once children are comfortable in playing games with words, syllables, and rhymes, move onto phonemic awareness.

Develop Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness refers to an understanding that words and syllables are comprised of a sequence of elementary speech sounds. This understanding is essential to learning to read an alphabetic language. The majority of children with reading disabilities fail to grasp this idea.

In teaching phonemic awareness, the focus of all activities should be on the sounds of words, not on letters or spellings.

Use strategies that make phonemes prominent in children's attention and perception. For example, model specific sounds, such as /s/ in the word sat, and ask children to produce each sound in isolation and in many different words until they are comfortable with the sound and understand its nature.

Begin with simple words and simple challenges, e.g., listen for initial /s/ in sat, sit, sip, and sad . . . or for long /e/ in me, see, bee . . . .

Teach students to blend phonemes into words. Begin by identifying just one phoneme, e.g., /m/-ilk, /s/-at, working gradually toward blending all the phonemes in words, e.g., /s/-/a/-/t/.

Teach students to identify the separate phonemes within words, e.g., what is the first sound of soup? What is the last sound of kiss? Beginning phonemes are easier to identify than final phonemes.

Once students are comfortable listening for individual phonemes, teach them to break up words, into component sounds, e.g., /m/-/oo/-/s/= "moose".

Create a sequence of segmenting and blending activities to help students develop an understanding of the relationship between sounds in words.

Provide children with more support when first teaching a task. For example, model a sound or strategy for making the sound, and have the children use the strategy to produce the sound. Model and practice several examples. Prompt the children to use the strategy during guided practice, and gradually add more examples. As the students master these skills, provide less teacher-directed instruction and more practice and challenge.

Make teaching phonological awareness a top priority. Opportunities to engage in phonological awareness activities should be plentiful, frequent, brief, and fun.

Phonemic awareness is essential for learning to read, but it is not enough by itself. It must be coupled with instruction and practice in learning the relationship between letters and sounds.

Teach the Relation of Sounds and Letters

Students should learn the letters of the alphabet and discriminate each letter from the other, because each stands for one or more of the sounds that occur in spoken words.

When presenting each letter, model its corresponding sound and have children produce the sound themselves. For children with learning disabilities, the teaching activities must be explicit and unambiguous.

At first, teach and work with only a few letter-sound correspondences that have high utility in many words (e.g., /m/ in man, mad, him, and ham). Postpone teaching less frequently occurring letters until students have a firm understanding of how left-to-right spellings represent first-to-last sounds (alphabetic understanding).

Teach Children How to Sound Out Words

After students have mastered a few letter-sound correspondences, teach them to decode words or sound them out. Begin with small, familiar words. Teach the children to sound out the letters, left to right, and blend them together, searching for the word in memory.

Model sounding out the word, blending the sounds together and saying the word. The ability to sound out new words allows children to identify and learn new words on their own.

Give children stories containing words that reflect the letter-sound patterns that have been taught, and encourage them to sound out words whenever they are uncertain.

Help children learn spelling conventions, such as the use of final /e/ to mark long vowels, by comparing and contrasting lots of examples.

Teach Children to Spell Words

Teach children to spell words by sounding their letters one by one. Model the sounding and spelling process for children as they spell.

Begin with short words children can sound out, because these words follow regular spelling conventions, e.g., cap, bat, and sit instead of cape, bait or sight.

Begin with simple words that do not contain consonant blends, e.g., ham and pan instead of slam and plan.

Encourage students to use spelling knowledge and strategies regularly in their own writing.

Introduce spelling conventions systematically. Begin with words that exemplify the most frequent and basic conventions, and provide support and practice to help students generalize from these words to others. The goal is to help them see the spelling conventions in the words.

Use words in which letter-sound correspondences represent their most common sounds (e.g., get instead of gem).

Develop a sequence and schedule of opportunities that allow children to apply and develop facility with sounds and words at their own pace. Specify what skills to assess and when to assess them so that you will know when to move on. Take into account each student's background knowledge and pace in moving from sounding out to blending words to reading connected text.

Help Children Develop Fluent, Reflective Reading
ERIC Clearinghouse on Disabilities and Gifted Education

Help children learn to read fluently by requiring them to read new stories and reread old stories every day.

Help children extend their experience with the words, language, and ideas in books by interactively reading harder texts with them and to them every day.

Relate information in books to other events of interest to children, such as holidays, pets, siblings, and games. Engage children in discussion of the topics.

In both stories and informational texts, encourage wondering. For example, "I wonder what Pooh will do now?" "How do you think the father feels ?" or "I wonder what frogs do in the winter? Do you think that's a problem? Why?"

Model comprehension strategies and provide students with guided assistance.

Point out how titles and headings tell what a book is about.

Help students identify the main ideas presented in the text, as well as the supporting detail. Graphics help to reveal main ideas, and the relationship between text and graphics helps students understand what they are reading.

Point out unfamiliar words and explore their meaning. Revisit these words frequently and encourage students to use them in their own conversations.

Show children how to analyze contextual clues to figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Research shows that most vocabulary growth comes from learning new words in reading.

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Reading is the single most important educational skill your students will learn. Understanding the organization and meaning of text and instruction in both phonics and literature is essential to helping young children read. By understanding the prerequisite skills for reading, teachers can build a solid foundation for their students to learn and succeed in school....

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This article discusses effective reading interventions for students with learning disabilities. Dr. Swanson (2009) identified the specific teaching methods and instruction components that proved most effective for increasing word recognition and reading comprehension skills in children and teens with LD.

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Effective Reading Interventions for Kids with Learning Disabilities

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Research-based information and advice for sizing up reading programs and finding the right one for your child with a learning disability.

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What works continued... NO Miracle Cure!

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What works continued... NO Miracle Cure!

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In the previous article, Dr. Swanson (2009) states, "There is no 'miracle cure' for reading disabilities. Even a reading program that has all the right elements requires both student and teacher to be persistent and work steadily toward reading proficiency."

These strategies used for reading instruction do not create miracles for reading abilities, but instead provides ways for teachers and parents to effectively help their child when choosing an appropriate strategies. Hope and hard work support reading progress the most!

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This is an article that parents can use to read about what they can do at home to help support their child with their reading.

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Some of the following suggestions and strategies may help children who are experiencing problems with decoding, comprehension, or reading retention. Many of those listed are accommodations that work around a child's differences by offering alternative approaches at home and at school. Look for those that you think might work best and, when applicable, talk to your child's teacher about using some of them in class.

Word games and puzzles are fun and also build vocabulary and word understanding. Try crossword puzzles, word bingo, Scrabble®, or Boggle®.

Encourage children to read directions, labels, and signs in the classroom, at home, in the car, and at stores or shops, and have them take turns reading aloud with a classmate, parent, or sibling. Discuss in class or at home what you are reading.

Model reading as an enjoyable activity.

You might informally discuss what you are reading with your child or let him or her see family members or teachers enjoying reading. Have DEAR time several times a week where everyone "Drops Everything And Reads" for 20 minutes.

Help children remember by having them explain, discuss, or apply information they have just read, letting them "teach" you facts or ideas they have learned from their reading, or encouraging them to act out characters from their reading selections.

Your child may benefit from listening to his or her textbooks and trade books on tape or by using assistive technologies like screen readers.

Read to your child every night.

Read novels above his or her reading level to stimulate and enrich language, creativity, and interest. Ask structured questions and encourage your child to predict multiple endings to each chapter.

Engage children's senses while learning.

Children with learning disabilities learn best when they use many of their senses to get information. Multi-sensory instruction allows the child to see, hear, touch, and act out words. For example, to learn letters children may read the printed letter, say the letter name, shape the letter out of clay, trace the letter onto paper, and form their bodies into the shape of the letter.
Back to Reading Home

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Some of the following suggestions and strategies may help children who are experiencing problems with decoding, comprehension, or reading retention. Many of those listed are accommodations that work around a child's differences by offering alternative approaches at home and at school.