I am building a reading program for special needs students in the secondary level. No formal program in the areas of math or reading has ever been established here. These ares students in the age group of 15-21 but with the reading comprehension level of about 4th grade.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Melanie
Re: Reading for secondary special needs students
I know of some comprehension materials which are high interest, low level vocabulary books. The stories are non fiction and are of interest to any age. There are three books, one for reading levels 1-3, second 4-6, third 7-9, and fourth 10-12. The title is Reading Stories for Comprehension by Katherine L. Hall. A copy can be sent for review before paying for the book. It can be ordered from www.phdirect.com.
FInd out why they’re stuck at that level. WHere I taught kids in that situation, most of them could guess the common words well enough to read at third-fourth grade level, but were fundamentally clueless about how to figure out what a word they didn’t know was. (I remember the first time I suggested a kid “sound out” a word and got a blank look…)
I’ve put lots of ideas & resources on my website at http://www.resourceroom.net — things like books that are reasonably easy to read but interesting for older students, lots of vocabulary development that you can tweak up and down for different level kids without it looking like they’re getting different level stuff (they would get the same latin or greek root, but different words to work with), and comprehension ideas.
I had a lot of success with SRA Corrective Reading, which is very, very structured (and scripted, which a lot of people *don’t* like, but I”m such a free spirit that it just balances the rest of my teaching style out :)) .I ran them through the placement test (which was a reality check of its own for some of them, who swore they could read just fine) and grouped them, and asked them to work with me for three weeks after which they could decide to keep it or chuck it. They decided to keep it — that was consistent with the three or four times I used it in other settings too (the first time, I honestly didn’t know if I’d like it, much less them ;)).
I saw about two years’ of growth from most kids in a semester — and for kids that had taken 8 or nine years to get 4 years of progress, that was a big deal.
Other people (and I hope they’ll post) have had lots of success with Phono-Graphix which isn’t so scripted and gets right to the meat of reading so you’ll see progress quickly. It isn’t perfect either, of course ;).
SInce then I specialized in teaching kids with dyslexia at a private school and used ORton-Gillingham multisensory methods - but I had lots of training and team teaching, and small caseloads and classes so I could do a lot of diagnostic-prescriptive teaching. I got excellent results that went beyond just reading accuracy and into more complex language skills. Wilson Language (http://www.wilsonlanguage.com) has an Orton-GIllingham program designed for older kids and adults if you want to check that out.