Learn the basics about inclusion, characteristics of inclusive classrooms that work, and things you can do to implement inclusion principles right away — including setting up your classroom, creating effective learning groups, and adapting your curriculum.
Creative supports are key to helping learners succeed in distance education. Try these 12 ideas to help students on the spectrum feel connected, stay engaged, and learn effectively in the virtual classroom and beyond.
With careful and creative planning, literacy instruction can be adapted to meet the needs of every student in the classroom. Five ways teachers can provide a literacy education for all learners are offered here.
ELL students learn new words everyday, and it’s essential that they have a deep understanding of what those words mean. Without comprehension, new words are useless. The key to helping ELL students succeed is to give them explicit instruction in the academic language of the content they are learning in class. This article offers some strategies and resources for getting started!
Getting information from a nonfiction text can be especially challenging for ELLs, who may not have had much experience working independently with expository texts. This article offers ways that teachers can help ELLs work effectively with nonfiction texts and includes strategies for introducing components, structure, and purpose of expository texts.
Suggestions for fostering independent reading include: (a) Give children books that are not too difficult. (b) Help them find books they will enjoy. (c) Encourage them to try many kinds of material. Although independent reading cannot substitute for teaching decoding, it improves reading comprehension and the habit of reading.
Inferential thinking is a key comprehension skill that develops over time through explicit teaching and lots of practice. Find strategies for teaching inferencing, watch a demonstration, and observe a classroom lesson in action.
Learn how to teach children to write informational text through the use of focused read-alouds that include discussions of information book genre elements, features, and organizational structure. See examples of book compositions by second-grade authors that demonstrate how read-alouds can support young writers’ genre knowledge development.
These six short video clips give you the chance to watch and learn effective classroom-based assessment strategies. The video clips are from the Reading Rockets PBS television series, Launching Young Readers.
The following are sample charts you can use when assessing students informally in the classroom. Most of the assessments here should be given one-on-one.
An informal assessment of reading inventory, including what the assessment measures, when is should be assessed, examples of questions, and the age or grade at which the assessment should be mastered.
