Reaching low students

[moonstrucky]

Next year, I'm going to be teaching a high school English I/II class - combined together, double/block all year, to students who are sophomores emerging from a full year of intense reading intervention. Some are at a second or third grade reading level. Some are at a seventh grade level. All are special education. There will be 17 in the class. I

Comments

[snuck]

*I'm not an english teacher* but these are ideas that you might be able to use

[jobey_in_error]

1) One small tip -- highly consistent warm-up. The lower the class, and the more Special Ed students, the more important this is. (In my Honors classes we have a much greater variety of warm-ups, some of which are very creative and fun, but the point of a warm-up is the students can do it on their own. Do not have more than two variations of your warm-up activity for this class.)

I never call it "daily oral language" but I have found a three-minute proofreading a sentence activity to practice grammatical or formatting rules is a great choice. It takes a few minutes to do and then go over the correct answer, and then everyone is settled in for much bigger, more comprehensive English work. (These have to be rules that they have seen before, but they don't have to be rules they learned very well. Give them five warm-ups in a row and go over them each day, and they will then know the rules a lot better. Common Core "Language" standards are a good place to start. Go back as far as first-grade kindergarten and keep going up until you find

[jobey_in_error]

P.S. Can their reading intervention or other past teachers give you some hints on some of the students' passions? It would help for brainstorming your projects or focus themes for the year.