As a new teacher I have found the advice on this board to be terrific and have implemented many of your suggestions. I feel really good about where most of my 27 kids are. I have, however, 4 moderate kids and was wondering if there is a board like this one that shares idea for moderate kids.Anyone know where to look?
Re: other kids
I teach in a K-6 middle income school resource room. My moderate kids have IQ’s between 50-60, one has Fragile X, another is not yet very verbal, lots of grunting. The other two are twin brothers for who life is hard in all aspects, also 50-60 IQs. I really feel there is so much more they should be doing but as a new teacher with no experience in working with that level of kids, I am unsure as to what is appropriate at this age. Was hoping to find a great board like this but more geared for their needs.
Re: other kids
Hi las,
Okay, I see what you’re looking for now. I was going to ask what you meant by moderate kids, but then I saw that you said all the rest were doing just fine so I assumed that you were a regular classroom teacher. And I assumed wrong….*s*
Good luck on your quest. I can’t help, but I hope someone else can now that they know what you are looking for….Rod
Hi las,
Well, I’ve got a suggestion for you, but I’ll warn you that you may be opening quite a can of worms if you try to implement it.
Do some reading on vision therapy and the types of visual problems that it addresses. I’m assuming you’re teaching 1st, 2nd or possibly 3rd grade here, by the way. Put vision therapy into Google and you’ll find plenty of reading material.
After you get a feel for vision therapy and the problems it addresses, get a symptom list and see how many symptoms your four “moderates” exhibit. As a further screen, talk to the parents of those kids and see if there is a family history, up one side of the family, of kids having trouble learning to read in the early grades (or a history of obvious vision issues.)
Based on what I’ve been seeing I would guess that at least two and possibly all four of your “moderates” are being held back by an undiagnosed vision issue. You’ll find that the school will probably discourage you from traveling too far down this route, so the best thing to do is usually to just inform the parents of your suspicions (assuming you end up having such suspicions in the end, of course.)
To help you get started, here is a short list of things you may be seeing in some of those “moderates.”
- headaches after reading
- avoidance of reading material, particularly finer print
- very poor posture, as they try to squirm to get one eye blocked or at a different distance from the page as the other eye
- lousy handwriting caused by their inability to get visual input aligned with motor output
- overtly covering one eye with a hand or blocking it with the nose as they read (a dead-giveaway)
- complaints of blurriness, words moving, doubled letters (these are also dead-giveaways)
- older brothers/sisters who had the same trouble (it’s genetic)
- an obvious tendency to become fatigued after reading for just a short while, say five or ten minutes.
- a parent who says “yes, just like me when I was trying to learn to read.” (the genetic tendency becomes extremely obvious once you start asking the question.)
Hope this turns out to be of some help….keep after them…Rod
PS: From my experience, if you only have two to four such kids in a class of 27, you’re either lucky, or your school is not in a low socio-economic area. I’m curious if your school is located in a relatively well-off neighborhood. Is it? (Or, you’re not teaching in grades 1-3 as I was assuming…..)