Teaching 4th/5th grades on a K/1st grade level

Are these students actually LD, ie of average or higher intelligence but with specific difficuties in reading etc.? Or are they mentally delayed? It makes a big difference.

If they are genuinely LD, my take on the issue — and I know quite a few people here are of the same opinion — is that the most important thing you can do is to get them the reading skills to catch up. After a few months of *effective* basic skills teaching, then you can use subject matter reading on an appropriate level to get both reading skills and subject matter. If you don’t do this, you are just passing the problem down the line and the problem gets steadily worse.

If they are mentally delayed, that is a whole different issue, and you need to find material suited to their mental development.

One thing I haven’t dealt with, but have heard from other people: When kids are young, in primary grades, it is possible to adapt the curriculum because it is already pretty basic and simple. As you move up through the grades, as you are now, adaptation gets more and more difficult and later impossible. if you are ion this situation, you are going to have to make some pretty big compromises.

I think in terms of the backgroundknowledge I want them to have for the rest of their lives, and the skills I want them to have for the rest of their lives.

What are the plans for getting those reading skills moving?

What’s entirely too likely for these students is that they will spend this year doing “easy to read” worksheets which they don’t comprehend (but are coached through, and if you manage the class right they can at least feel like they can behave themselves and follow directions, though if you’ve got a bright one or two in there they’ll be frustrated and may act out anyway)… won’t read any better… and spend the next couple years doing the same thing.

Then they’ll go to junior high and high school (or not)… and we’ll all wonder why they have such low skills and bad attitudes.

You aren’t going to be able to restructure the school system between now & August, but you can make some priorities.

I would figure out a structure for the day; a predictable routine that you can stick to.

You’ll find that these kiddos often can learn a *lot* from videos and hands-on things…. IF IF IF you also hold htem accountable for the language used to explain that stuff, and IF IF IF you hand-pick a few choice Big Ideas (and I do mean a FEW!!!).

Don’t be afraid to spend time memorizing stuff. Rote learning is grossly underrated because it was overrated for so long. So, I would make a list of the 5 states that you think are most important for them to know, and open the first part of the day (or that period) with studying 3 of them them for 4 or 5 minutes (especially if they’re hard to spell) and then qive a quiz on them. You can set creative spelling standards at first, so that htey can still get a B or an A with things mangled, but then work that spelling into the day. (I’ve got some ways to practice spelling on my site - click on “reading and spelling” from the link in my signature.)
In my experience, when these folks are doing work they understand they’ll actually have attention spans and work at it… and when they get evaluated appropriately — quizzes when they *know* it — they work even harder. So I approach the year a little like I learned to approach swimming — yes, some would call it “dumbing it down” — at the *very beginning.* Idea is that if they honestly believe (based on experience) that you’re not going to ask them to do anything they can’t do, after a while they will *try* things they think they can’t do because you asked them to do it.
Then the next day we review that material and have another quiz on the same stuff.
Cool thing about states is you can also do it without the spelling — have a map and give them the states in a list, and have competency levels. WHen they’ve mastered the first five, they can move to the “tens.” And if you have a running tally of what the entire class’s total Right States is, then when TImmy finally gets all five in the first one, it is still boosting the class’s score and (especially if you’ve coached them on encouraging each other) everybody’s rooting for him.
I’ve rambled enough… but what also helped me a lot was getting comfortable wiht a LOT of repetition — that *I* was the one who was bored, not them :-) And when they were succeeding, I wasn’t bored anymore. And when they could independently label those states, it wasn’t a false “good self-esteem” deal, either; they were doing what many of their peers couldn’t.
Most of the stuff on my site is geared to middle &: high school but there will probably be stuff you can grab & use.
Also read to them… and look for the ones who are smarter than their test scores and might could stand to sneak out into the regular classroom. (SOme of my difficult middle schoolers were highly motivated to behave and achieve when I arranged with a teacher for them to spend a period in the “regular” class — though I wouldn’t have done that unless I trusted her to make darned sure it would be a positive experience for the students in question.)
And… the BOTTOM line is, I would teach them stuff that is in the curriculum, but I do care mroe about teaching children than teaching curriculum. Also, rarely did anybody ever give me any grief about my curriculum choices, unfortuantely usually because as long as I was keeping those kiddos “contained” I must be doing my job. Aargh.
(And the other bottom line is… what’s being DONE about the skills levels? BEcause whether or not they know about 5 kinds of energy or not, that’s not going to help them as much as being able to read “energy.”)

Oh!! And the REal Secret to teaching Content AReas — the nonfiction section of the library, if it’s any good. (If the school library’s lousy, go “shopping.” There’s really good stuff out there, full of pictures to match with words.)

Yea, I know, it’s not a website. You have teo go there :-)

But also, matching quizzes where you match a picture to a term are really easy to make from googling “images.” They match the picture to the scene from the Civil war, and then tell you how they knew that it was right.

And I have also been known to spend 30 minutes of a Science period teaching SRA Corrective Reading, and 10 minutes doing a brief exercise with energy or forces or whatever (though I think that was Biology). I got approval from their parents first, and kept it at a low profile with the admins. THese *were* students whose reading level were the main thing keeping ‘em out of regular classes, though — fairly bright kiddos who were quite willing to tackle the skills that kept them from being “normal.”

Really, your willingness to think beyond the “curriculum” can make an awfully big difference in these kids’ lives.

I’m with the others (if these kids are not cognitively delayed)…the science and social studies are irrelevant when kids are that delayed in reading. Sue mentioned a program that would be good..SRA Corrective Reading Decoding. It is very expensive to buy from SRA, but I have bought a complete set on ebay, level by level.

I’d just do some unit studies in the meanwhile for Science and SS. Choose a topic, get some books like Sue mentioned, find some videos on the topic, go to a museum, and spend most of your time remediating reading and math.

Janis

I agree pretty much. I don’t think most of the low interest high vocab stuff is very good and mostly condemns them to a low reading level. Do your science and social studies hands on (experiments in class, art projects geared to the topics, museum, etc.) YOu wouldn’t believe how much is on the net. A couple of balloons can teach more about Newton’s laws than all the texts put together. Spend your serious work time— I mean anything they have to read or write to remediation.

—des

I have a feeling I know what kind of SDC you have…Those are the ones that I work with on a day to day basis. I am an SLP and I help the teachers by creating materials using boardmaker and writing with symbols. http://www.mayer-johnson.com/software/Wws.html
http://www.synapseadaptive.com/donjohnston/wrisymd.htm

Another product I love that uses writing with symbols and also increases the child’s vocabulary and awarness of current events is called
News-2-You. http://www.news-2-you.com/ It is great especially for kids with low cognitive levels and those that can’t grasp the orthographic prinicipals for reading…it has lots of pictures, the students may not be able to read the words under the pictures but they are picking up the vocabulary and concepts and the parents just love it as it has something new each week that the student can share with his family and friends about current events… It also as a PDF aloud feature which will READ the paper to your student…

I hope this helps you…good luck and let us know how things go…

I forgot to include that most of these students are MMD also. I had most of the same kids last year, but I also had students at the time who could help them because they were ready for the regular classroom again. This year I’m looking at a whole new ballgame with this students.
I had planned on doing some research on books that I could use for the subject.
I will also look at the websites some of you have given me.
Another question I have is does anyone have any good ideas on center ideas for this age level that aren’t too “babyish”. I already have some set up, but from last year I know that they only like to stay in them for maybe 10 minutes and then switch. I did centers for quite awhile last year because I taught mainly one on one.
Also about the curr. I totally agree about teaching the reading and not worrying as much about reading but we have routine visits by people to make sure we are on track with all our students.

wHEN i HAD a group like that, I found they *really* liked predictable structure. It was almost on a whim that I wrote an “Agenda” on the board one day with the outline of what we were going to do. Saint Murphy was smiling on me since that was the day my supervising VP dropped in on me and was just so impressed that I did that… but the students really got to like it and would reminde me to put it up when I forgot.
More than half of this class was arrested within a year of their 18th birthdays, which is doubly aggravating because when they knew what they were expected to do, and it was something they *could* do, they tended to do it and be proud of it. The last day of school I told them that collectively they were to do 300 arithmetic problems and they were done for the year. They dove in, cranked them out (I had them in small doses on half-sheets of paper, so every time they turned one in the tally went up… and if they were going too fast I could give them the harder ones :-)) … and gosh, they had 15 minutes of free time at the end of the day, which wasn’t even enough unstructured time for *them* to get into trouble, even on the last day of school.

You know, a couple of years back, when I started teaching 4-6 SDC I was faced with the same dilemma. Is it really LD or is it a cognitive delay…unfortunately it had happened that some students were misidentified for a myriad of unacceptable reasons and turned out to be “difficult students” that nobody wanted to deal with so they were never really taught.
Now, once it is determined that your students are either cognitively delayed or have some difficulty in reading, or if they just weren’t taught what they were supposed to back in K-3, then you must determine your action plan. Most of my students now, after much pressure and requests for re-evaluation have been determined to be SLD and during our L. Arts exchange go to me for Reading, Writing, Spelling, etc… I too use an SRA program, it’s called the REACH System and it has many components. At the moment we are using Decoding, Comprehension, Reasoning and Writing, Writing Extensions, ans Spelling through Morphographs, there are different levels and each level has it’s corresponding components. This is a Direct Instruction program and when done with fidelity it works wonders, students who were non-readers start developing the necessary skills and strategies needed to become strong independent readers.
This is a very expensive program, my district pays for part of it, the other components I’ve had to purchase on my own. A problem I did encounter with this program is that my district “strongly encourages” (you know what that translates to) that ALL students participate in Accelerated Reading (Reading Renaissance Program) but the REACH system advises against it, so what do you do with those students who learn quickly? Well, SRA has high-interest reading books you can order but they too are expensive. You can go “shopping” as another poster recommended but you need to ensure that they are low readability(not necessarily so, depending on the individual student and your assessment of the situation) but high interest reading.
Those students who just weren’t taught the basic skills for becoming readers are lacking so much, but since they are not learning disabled the learning process won’t take as long and may not require as much structure as a Direct Instruction program provides. Here you will rely on your skills as a teacher and adapt and modify a curriculum while first teaching Concepts About Print, Phonics, Phonemic Awareness, Decoding, Accuracy, Fluency, etc…. Grade leve expository text and content area reading won’t even figure into the equation until these basic skills are in place so don’t fret, it’s a lengthy process but it can be done. You can start incorporating expository and content area reading slowly with lower level books and build up your students reading ability.
I hope this helps, I know it’s a bit on the lengthy side but I wanted to make sure that I provided enough information, but I think I might have gone overboard.

Wow, Vanessa, that is great that your system has bought you the SRA Direct Instruction materials! For the original poster, the SRA Corrective Reading that Sue and I mentioned earlier is a component of the REACH system that Vanessa uses. I also have Spelling Through Morphographs, but all my kids are in Spelling Mastery at the moment.

Janis

You know, I was just as surprised as you were when they offered to buy part of the program components for me. I did however, do my research and took a course on Direct Instruction and submitted my proposal, along with other Special Education teachers.
The program has worked wonders and I have taught Level A and Level B1. Level A decoding is incredible, I really enjoyed having my students learn so quickly and having them keep track of their progress as an intrinsic motivator was great!!! I hope others have access to these materials, they are expensive, but they are definitely worth it!

I’m with Victoria and Sue on this one. I constantly run into this problem and recently have had a revelation. If they are in 5th and reading on a k level, is science and ss a major priority? The parents I work with concur that time should be spent on reading, reading, reading if they haven’t gotten it yet. Maybe touch on some of the basics in content, but your major priority should be to build up the reading. I was training for SRA and the instructor, a retired spec. ed. teacher, said her philosophy was that for every grade level they are behind, students should spend and EXTRA hour of reading. Your kids should be spending much of their day working on reading and math skills. Believe me, it will pay off later! :wink: