Special Education

Teaching Students with Learning and Behavioural Differences
A Resource Guide for Teachers

Academic Considerations - Strategies for Secondary Teachers


See Appendices 6, 7, 8 and 9

Literacy Skills

Expanding a limited vocabulary.

Strategies

  • Teach student to preview material to develop list of words that may cause difficulty.
  • Provide students with list of key vocabulary to be used in a lesson.
  • Help student to develop note cards with personal vocabulary list.
Extending limited comprehension.

Strategies

  • Teach key connecting words which cue relationships between ideas.
  • Provide summaries or simplified forms of novels or other reading material to augment understanding.
  • Suggest use of bookmarks to place above or below line to prevent losing place in text.
  • Provide practice in predicting and summarizing as students use RAP.
  • Model effective reading strategies including techniques such as previewing, highlighting and note taking.
  • Provide tape recording so students can listen while they read.
  • Provide opportunities for pairs of students to oral read materials.
  • Encourage students to use visualization and verbalization to support comprehension. For example, students can create a visual image of a charecter in a novel being read in order to support inference and understanding of relationships between charecters.

Resolving confusion that results when there is too much print on a page.

Strategies

  • Consider altering the format of handouts to reduce the amount of material in the visual field For example, use underlining or shading to highlight important concepts, reduce the amount of print on a page, and construct tests with large amounts of white space.
Developing composition skills.

Strategies

  • Teach pre-writing activities such as organizers.
  • Provide opportunities for student to discuss topic and generate a list of words to guide written plan.
  • Consider the ideas as the principal goal rather than the form or style in initial stages of writing process.
  • Consider oral demonstrations of knowledge.
  • Allow more time for written assignments.
  • Teach students to proofread in pairs.
  • Provide teacher consultation for revision stages of the writing process.
Improving handwriting skills.

Strategies

  • Encourage students to use word processor.
  • Allow laptop computers for students to use in class.
  • Allow audio or video taped recording of assignment as an alternative to written.
Improving spelling and mechanics.

Strategies

  • Encourage the use of electronic spell-checkers.
  • Limit the weighting of spelling on the evaluation.
  • Assist student to develop a personal spelling dictionary to refer to when proofreading.
  • Model and teach editing skills.
  • Establish peer editing procedures.

The Hamburger Strategy

or
How to plan a paragraph
that tastes good.

Like a good cook, the paragraph writer needs to collect all the necessary ingredients and put them together in good order!