One thing I've found very important for my K-3 SPED students is teaching them Phonemic Awareness skills. Many of these students come in with no knowledge of Phonemic awareness and that is their biggest problem. I've found
that once they learn this, they are learning to read and spell quickly.
One other thing you can try with varied reading levels/grades, is reading buddies. My students loved this. At first they didn't but they learned to. You can group them several ways, but one thing I like to do at least once a week is group like the top reader, with the middle reader. Then the 2nd best reader
with the 2nd below the middle reader, etc... What I have them do, is the better reader in each pair reads a story/text first, then the lower reader will read with the better one helping.
