How to Improve Reading for Students With Disabilities
Teaching any student to read can be a challenge for teachers. However, working with students with disabilities provides unique obstacles in this process. If you want to improve reading comprehension for your students who have disabilities, make use of the available technology and practice solid instructional techniques in order to help your students achieve.
Instructions
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Start with the basics. According to the Elementary and Middle Schools Technical Assistance Center, "For children with learning disabilities and children who are low achievers, systematic phonics instruction, combined with synthetic phonics instruction, produced the greatest gains." Teach students the letters of the alphabet, the sounds they make, letter blends, and finally sounding out words. These are the building blocks of literacy that will carry over into other reading skills later.
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Use reading games online. Children with learning disabilities may have difficulty processing words on paper, but the interactive format of reading websites provides the creativity they need to improve their reading skills. Sites like readwritethink.org and scholastic.com provide interactive reading games and activities for children that can open up new pathways to reading.
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Provide auditory reading devices for your students. Give them books on CD or mp3 books to listen to as they read along. Hearing an experienced reader narrate the story for them can make it easier for them to understand what they are reading.
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Engage in shared reading activities. Give your students a copy of a story and then read it aloud with them. Stop periodically as you read to ask them questions or tell them insights about what you are thinking. In this way, you model good reading habits for your students and show them how a good reader reads a story. Then they can practice these skills on their own as they read independently.
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Use reading journals. Ask students to write answers to a short prompt before they read in order to get them thinking about the topic of the story for that day. For example, before reading a story about King Midas you might ask them about a time they wished they had something and it turned out differently than they expected. After they read, ask them questions about the story and have them write their responses in their journals. Reading journals encourage students to interact with the stories they read, in order to help them retain more information from those stories.
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