Some other ideas

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Home : 2003 : September : 16

Some other ideas
By Cathy-Dee

You've already had some good ideas given, but I thought up a couple more that may help as well.

Before I get started - I'm with you on the funding. I teach in Canada and we have similar problems here. It is hard to get
funding that would mean a TA in the classroom which would make the world of difference for so many of these students.
I don't quite understand the testing myself - it's not like these children will be able to handle the test as their peers do so their marks will still bring down the test results regardless.
I do know there are some students on IEP's who with extra work and resource

time could be brought up to a much closer grade level but it's that extra resource time that is so fundamental in this.

Anyway.....

- can you get student helpers from a high school nearby - quite often high schools are looking for schools or classes to take students for work experience.

- talk to your grade 1 and 2 teachers and see if you can borrow some of their resource books and make up your own workbooks, etc., for these students.

- talk again with your administrator - see if you can get TA time for even 1 class per day where you have have that TA working on specific skills with these students. If they are low-readers perhaps working on sight words.

- We've also started a new program in some of our schools called Precision Reading. It's something developed by an Educator at the University of Manitoba. It's quite an interesting program and actually very easy to learn and to use. I don't use it myself at least right now as I teach grade 1 but I may begin to use it after Christmas with some of my students.
The basic premise is that you write stories using specific sight words for the students to read. They read the passage day one and you highlight the words they did not know and make flash cards of these words. They practice these words and then day two you read the passage again and gradually by the end of the week they should be able to read the passage with no mistakes.
Then the next week you make a new passage using some of the same words as well as adding 5-6 new words and do the same process. The overall activity should only take 5-8 minutes per day.

This link is the only one I could find on the this
http://www.umanitoba.ca/unevoc/2002conference/text/wp_freeze.shtml

Hope this helps