Reading and Writing Strategies

This month I am supervising the Learning Disabilities Practicum. I have five teachers and twenty children (ages 6-14) with disabilities in the program which meets for half a day for four weeks. The curriculum includes academics, social skills, and physical activities.

Some of the things we are discussing are some strategies for teaching reading and writing and I thought I would share them here. I also found some websites that give great suggestions such as Reading a-z.com, Mindtools, and Just Read Now. If you have any other suggestions or links to great websites, I would love to see them. Please add them in your comments so I can share them with my teachers.

1. Ask students to retell or summarize the story.
2. Create graphic organizers.
3. Put pictures of story events in order.
4. Have students write their own reactions to stories and factual material.
5. Repeated reading: passages of 50 to 200 words long and at a difficulty level that enables the student to recognize most of the words. The student then reads the selection orally three or four times before proceeding to a new passage.
6. Reading predictable books
7. Language experience method: students dictate stories to the teacher. The stories then become the basis of their reading instruction.
8. K-W-L technique: Students think of and state all the knowledge they have on a subject. Each student thinks of wand writes on a sheet of paper what he or she want to learn from the reading. Students read the lesson silently and write what they have learned from the reading.
9. Highlighting multiple word meanings
10. Exploring sources of vocabulary using newspapers and advertising. Keep a list of new words.
11. Play word games like categories (name types of cars, or dogs, or buildings, or clothes etc.)
12. Word webs – like a graphic organizer; giving more details like “What is it?” “What is it like?” and “What are some examples?”
13. Point out syllables in multisyllabic words.
14. Teach word families (ex. At, cat, bat, rat)
15. Write in journals.
16. Use materials without words like comic books without captions or books with photos. The students figure out the story content from the pictures.
17. Written conversations – instead of saying what they wish to communicate to the class, they write the message and give it to the teacher or other students. Then the teacher or students respond in writing.
18. Patterned writing – the students use a favorite predictable book with a patterned writing and then they write their own version. (ex. Brown Bear, Brown Bear)
19. Express their ideas in pictures.

Original image: 'I Want to Live' http://www.flickr.com/photos/86603835@N00/36362014 by: Jay Ryness