Child attended small rural Catholic school through 8th grade. Begin receiving SLD services in the Catholic school towards the end of third grade. Basically an aide went for a couple hours a day to help child with school work, also used SRA Reading and Spelling Mastery.
Last year, she became my student. Reading level, maybe third grade, spelling at a second. Her IQ I am told is average. I put her in mostly general ed curriculum with many modifications. She also receives an extra period of language arts and a study hall to support her general education classes.
Her parents have met with me several times. They are concerned that she is taking biology, world history, etc. and yet she cannot remember her phone number or address.
Student WANTS to be in general ed. classes. And other than very poor organizational skills, she usually can verbally spitback an average amount of information. She has math scores in the low average range (beside word problems).
For the past two years she has received ‘summer school’. It has been believed that she needs to read CONSTANTLY to maintain her reading level. She does not read at all on her own at any level.
Student wants to go to a college or tech school. I have been using a word prediction software program and Kurzweil to assist her.
What direction should I go? Should I remove her from general ed classes and try to teach her BASIC life skills, like her phone number, or should I continue teaching her the skills she will need to survive in an academic setting?
I truly don’t know which direction I should go. At this point, I cannot see her attending a college. She may be able to survive at a tech school if she matures enough. But will she be able to hold a job?
Am I just missing the boat, is there a way to remediate a 10th grade student with virtually non-existant auditory discrimination or phonetic awareness?
Re: Need advice, PLEASE-
She has trouble remembering her phone number - but that’s a random-rote kind of number. Does she remember things that have more meaning, like processes, or is she only able to memorize and spit back… but not make connections? Does anything stay in there long term? OR is she surviving the courses, but not really learning anything?
What life skills are missing? Could be the parents would be willing to work with her in that department to keep her in those general ed classes. It’s hard to get a picture of just how disabled she is if she doesn’t have to read or process auditory words.
There are also an awful lot of reasonable career options at community colleges and the like, without major academics in the background. However, one of our real challenges is what to do with students who’ve managed to survive high school, and think that the same spitting back will get them through English 101 and 102. Unless they get lucky and get pretty much all of the show-up-and-smile-for-an-A teachers (which still sadly exist in college, too - and they think they’re “helping”) they find it extremely frustrating and “unjust.” (Heck, it always working in high school… they *are* trying their very very best… it just isn’t there…) So… my big question would be - can she do critical thinking?
Re: Need advice, PLEASE-
The idea that she has to read constantly to keep up her reading skills, ie not to lose them — that is a huge red flag for using brute-force memorization. And when she leaves your school and you cannot watch her every second, what is going to happen?
On another thread Sue posted about a book “Never Too Late to Read” — something like that might be appropriate.
I work with teens and even some young adults who have been lost in the shuffle in school, recently an eighteen/nineteen year old who appeared to be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, and a thirteen/fourteen year old with (formerly) nonexistent decoding and writing skills in high school. And yes, you *can* teach phonemic awareness and decoding and encoding to teens, and *yes* it makes a huge difference to that student as a basic life skill. I would suggest very strongly that you work on giving her whatever you can of basic literacy skills, re-starting from the ground up, in conjunction with the practical vocabulary etc. that Sue has suggested.
Memory is a funny thing. I myself tend to do number reversals — and I’m a math major! My high school student *seems* to have a terrible memory — we will go over and over something in his English class or geography class, and two weeks later he acts like it’s Greek. We will read over a chapter and he will discuss it intelligently, but at the end he seems to have forgotten what he read. But things that we talk over in a casual way do stick with him, and things we do in my (highly repetitive) phonics workbooks do stick with him. As far as I can figure, the memory overload of trying to read by brute force memorization doesn’t allow him to take in any new info, and deliberate memorization puts him into failure mode; so I have to teach him by not teaching. In your student’s case the memorization reading is probably overstressing the memory banks, and she may have a number glitch like I do only worse. Teaching a ogical approach to learning as opposed to continual memorization will cut down the load and allow her to use the abilities she has more efficiently. You can also try different approaches to memorizing the phone number — for example, instead of just telling her “memorize this” which is a proven failure, better to try chanting it over *with* her orally ten times in the morning and ten times in the afternoon every day for three weeks,.
Re: Need advice, PLEASE-
Hmm, very poor memory and organizational skills. Has anyone considered ADHD Inattentive for this child?
But I agree with Victoria, she has not had the intensive reading remediation she needs. She likely needs advanced code and multi-syllable work. This is what happenes when parents rely on schools to remediate, sadly.
Janis
Re: Need advice, PLEASE-
Thanks for all the input. I will be sorting through it over the next week.
I will also be stopping back for any other suggestions.
From what I can see, she can spit back what she has heard, at least better than anything else. Which is why I felt spending time in the general ed classes was important.
When I said ‘parents’ I was trying to simplify the situation. It is actually grandparents who have custody. They are very caring, but she HATES living and working on the farm and refuses to do schoolwork for them.
She does not do homework and lies to both me and her grandparents.
Her transition plan is basically the problem. I am trying to do what I feel she needs- balanced with what I can do within the school-day. I get the impression that the grandparents feel I should be training her as a CD student. With only 2 1/2 years left, I just want to spend it doing whatever will be most helpful to her.
Re: Need advice, PLEASE-
“CD” student?
Tough situation :-( :-( Here’s hoping circumstances and humans conspire to get her to get a sense of who SHE is, instead of fighting the other folks she things are trying to define her… finding *her* strengths sounds like a real priority… so if she can be successful in gen. ed. classes, that’s huge - but if she can’t find something to motivate some actual learning, she’s going to have a tough row to hoe… especially if she doesn’t like farming…
And transitioning this child to adulthood. This is called an ITP (individual transition plan). In high school often we have to switch gears from academics into getting the students ready for the real world, teaching them marketable skills and helping them get jobs and to live on their own. Perhaps…this program will give you some ideas and also help you from Linguisystems.
http://www.linguisystems.com/itemdetail.php?id=735
Functional Vocabulary for Adolescents & Adults
by Beverly Plass
Item Number: 6-0629-3
Ages: 12-22 Grades: 7th-Adult Price $37.95
Increase the opportunities for independence! Teach young adults with developmental disabilities the vocabulary of home, community, work, and leisure.
Young adults with developmental disabilities, such as autism, have a better chance at an independent life when they have effective communication skills. That’s why it’s imperative to teach these students to understand and communicate about daily living. Teach the vocabulary of home, community, work, and leisure with Functional Vocabulary for Adolescents & Adults.
Benefits
Significantly increases the chance for independent living
Teaches the vocabulary of home, community, work, and leisure so clients know how to communicate about daily living
Perfect for older students and young adults with developmental disabilities such as autism, Down syndrome, and severe language-learning disorders
Teaches many of the topics found in the federally mandated Individual Transition Plan (ITP)
Lessons work through a series of receptive and expressive language tasks to tap all modalities
Pictures provide important visual cues for the tasks
Flexible format allows you start with the items and at the level that’s best for your students or choose the theme that fits what’s happening in your student’s life (such as looking for a job or shopping)
Features
Students work through this structure of tasks in each lesson:
point to the correct picture in response to your question
Show me the soap. What do you dry off with?
use provided picture cards in matching, listening, and visual memory tasks
imitate words and sentences and complete simple sentences
I see a washcloth.I use a ____.
name, describe, and answer questions about each item
Describe how you shave. Name six grooming items.
answer critical thinking and problem solving questions related to real-life situations
Why do you wash your hands before eating? How do you know if you need to shave?
Lesson themes are divided by home, community, work, and leisure and include 86 topics such as:
Home Community Work Leisure
grooming apartment job choices baseball
hair care city bus getting a job soccer
clothing bank/ATM baker helper board games
laundry restaurant laundry worker dance
food groups grocery store stock clerk movie theatre
Words are power. Your older students with developmental disabilities need to understand the words they interact with in daily life if they are to achieve greater independence.
Functional Vocabulary for Adolescents & Adults provides the right mix of visual and auditory tasks with structured lessons to teach the words your students and clients need to know to negotiate life.