I teach in a resource room with a range between 6-14 students who experience significant learning disabilities. Our school is considered to be highly economically disadvantaged. My students love to learn, have an amazing sense of humor, are inquisitive, but most of all they care about their learning. My goals for the resource room are to help these students meet their learning needs at their instructional level, develop social skills and make real-life connections.
Our unit displays an array of learning needs and styles.
These students are eager to learn new strategies and implement them. Each student is learning to take accountability for their learning.
They are learning how to make responsible choices that impact their learning.
Because these same students come to my resource room on a yearly basis, they have developed a unique sibling-like family relationship. I am continually amazed how these students are able to pull together and help each other. As their teacher, it is my job to better serve my students any way I can to help them become better learners and meet their individual needs.
My Project
These materials will make a difference in my students' learning when applied in a Reading Workshop: Reading with Meaning. Increasing literature is essential so that we can create a classroom that nurtures literacy motivation by integrating choice, collaboration and literacy tasks. Having access to rich and abundant materials for the students to read is a powerful tool for student motivation. I envision my students learning how to read and to think about what they are reading. Students will make connections, ask questions, draw inferences, synthesize information, learn the signals of confusion while reading, visual what they are reading, access background knowledge and increase their vocabulary.
We learn about ourselves as readers when we pay attention to what is going on inside our head.
Reading issues are often disguised. Some students are resistive readers where they can read but they don't want to. Some readers are word callers that can decode words but can't remember anything they read. Many of us, even adults, are "fake" readers where we are going through the motions. Often times, we don't have a purpose for reading. Readers determine what is important based on their purpose, having a purpose determines what is remembered. I would like to construct a plan for my students to use to help themselves make sense of their reading and use reading strategies to help them gain knowledge from their reading. I want my students to know how to go beyond the words.
Having additional literature resources will enable my students to have a wider variety of books to choose from. It is important that students are engaged while they are reading through choosing books of their interest. Students will be able to make connections to themselves and to the real-world.
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