Literacy in students with moderate to severe disabilities

This week your blog is a reflection on your weekly reading (K & H chapter 9).  From the reading, what ideas did you find to help support literacy for students with moderate and severe disabilities?  What strategies did you read about that would apply for students with other disabilities?  What questions or concerns do you have about teaching literacy for students with moderate and severe disabilities?

To support students with severe to moderate disabilities there are a many tools and activities that will get them to participate in reading.

One of these ideas is incidental teaching, which is a technique that in both the typical child, as well as those who have moderate to severe disabilities.  This technique takes advantage of the opportunities that happen in the natural environment of the child, such as school, home, and their community and created instruction from them.  For example, this could be done with by setting out a variety of toys that might interest the student, in the hopes that they will initiate their preferred toy.  Once the child does this, the teacher would encourage the student to vocalize about the item that they selected.

I also think that the picture exchange system would be helpful.  In this method, pictures are used as a means of creating a meaningful conversation with the student.  This idea is used with children who are autistic, but could also be used with pre-readers as a way to introduce high frequency words.

The greatest concern that I have about teacher older students literacy is the great variant of must know words.  The “must know” words that I am referring to are the one that are required to know to participate in society at a basic level.  For example, teaching a student the difference in the women’s men’s restroom is a valuable and needed skill, but not every business labels their doors wit the words women and men.  Often, especially in themed restaurants, the restrooms are often labels with the gender terms for that language or in slang that is not always discernable.  This would be problematic for anyone who is not familiar with the verbiage used, but especially those who struggle with literacy.

Assisting students with moderate to severe disabilities in the literate world that we live in is always a challenge.  Teaching techniques, such as those listed above will help those students become functional adults in a literate world.