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

[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 their level.)

Students can also "tell" that they have improved and learned something with this warm-up because it's so concrete. This gives you credibility that is sometimes hard to get while teaching English ("I already know English!") A lot of students don't grasp that they are getting an education by reading and analyzing texts unless the actual context of the text is enlightening to them. So it's important to prove in their minds that they are learning something in your class. Students, even low students, like learning stuff; it's just they are not very good at noticing whether or not they are. Hence, the proofreading warm-ups. Spend a week on formatting dialogue, two weeks reviewing how to fix run-ons, and start the year with very basic capitalization and punctuation errors...

Do not make the warm-up something students have to really do much reading and comprehending on their own. I agree with snuck that most reading should be done aloud.

2) Scavenger hunt for textual features. Students need to be able to know how to use the words "margin," "header," "indents," "dialogue," "screenplay," "paragraph variety," "index," "bibliography" etc. before they can analyze texts. Early on, give students time in class to go through your library, the school's library, or a stack of texts they will be reading that year (anthology textbook if you have one) with a checklist of features they are looking for. This is a good formative assessment for this sort of material. It can also generate interest in those texts as a previewing activity. (If a student says "Oooh, can we read this?" about something you always intended them to read, the correct answer is, "Well, I haven't quite decided yet. Does it look good to you?" ;-) Repeat this activity about 2/3rds of the way through the year to recapture some magic and to review for students (and to catch students who only recently decided to pay attention).

[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.