General suggestions for teaching the literature program to students with learning difficulties Excerpted from: “General guidelines for planning literature lessons, taking into account students with special needs”

1. Pre-teaching Teachers may choose to pre-teach the targeted higher- order thinking skill (HOTS) for this piece of literature through other activities in their classroom. Doing this will enable your students to already be familiar with the HOTS when they start to work on the literary text. Spiral the HOTS as often as possible. Example: Teaching the HOTS with a reading comprehension text from the coursebook and incorporating it in other activities in your classroom before the literature unit has begun. For more ideas see the webcast on the TLC site (Thinking through Literature and Culture) about Incorporating HOTS Instruction in Your Classroom Practices.

2. Never assume….. …. that previously taught material will still be remembered well enough by students for active use. Recycle (spiral) the vocabulary learned while reading the text. The more review, the better the retention. You can use any of the following: Repeat: oral repetition of the things that you want students to remember. Recycle: re-introduction of information in a different way. Re-enter: re-teaching and review what you have already taught. All of these should include active, production by the students.

3. Find connections (hooks) …. …. between the text and the students’ previous knowledge and/or skills. Relate back to previously taught content and re-enter (spiral) literary terms and HOTS in order to activate their previous knowledge and in order to give the literary text meaning for the students.  

4. Reading aloud to the students with learning disabilities is IMPERATIVE. Students should be encouraged to listen to the text as many times as possible. There are recordings of all of the literature texts of the test options on the TLC site. If you do the log, you should record the texts for your students or find them recorded online.

5. Content over accuracy Remember when assessing your students’ work that the emphasis is more on content than on accuracy. See the rubrics in the Literature Handbook.

6. Taking into account that students with learning disabilities often have difficulty writing, support them by: using guided writing models, graphic organizers and templates. Examples of various GOs are in the Toolbox for Students with Learning Disabilities. encouraging your students to use their learned vocabulary. providing language structures that can be used. using multisensory aids (e.g. Five-Finger Kinesthetic Memory Cues – can be downloaded from ToolBox). Title Place Time Characters Turning Point

8. Try to get through the first reading of a poem in one day… ….so they can get a general understanding of the poem. Then in subsequent lessons, go through a more detailed reading, in order to start analyzing and interpreting the poem. 9. For longer texts begin each lesson with a recap of what has happened so far in the story/play.

10. Vocabulary words should be divided into three categories: Type High frequency Words specific to the text Low frequency Definition These words should be taught. These words can be pre-taught to ensure comprehension while reading. These words can be glossed. Example 1 For the “Road Not Taken”: travel and traveler. For the “Road Not Taken”: diverge and undergrowth For the “Road Not Taken”: trodden Example 2 In “A Summer’s Reading”: neighborhood In “A Summer’s Reading”: respect In ”A Summer’s Reading”: urge

11. Make connections when appropriate and review After completing two or three literature texts, and when appropriate, tie them together and review with your class. Students may use their previously completed UGOs, adding memorable details (triggers) about the texts as you go along. Following is another GO that can help your students remember and make connections:

Title/People/ Place/Triggers (TPPT) Text People Place Triggers Mr. Know All Mr. Kelada a passenger ship pearls, people prejudices A Summer’s Reading George and Mr. Catanzarra poor neighborhood in New York City dropping out of school, lying, reading books

12. Focus…. ….on the main points/events/themes that you want your students to remember. Emphasizing the less significant details will confuse them, and dilute their focus. Example: Students must know that in All My Sons, Larry is missing in action or that Chris takes a stand against his father. They don’t have to remember how many pilots went down as a result of the cracked cylinder heads.

13. Flexibility and adaptability: Not all students in your class MUST do the same amount of tasks and in the same way. You can decide what is appropriate for your students with learning disabilities. Example: A student with writing disabilities could prepare a PowerPoint presentation, an oral presentation, fill in a chart or do something creative instead of a written composition that reflects the same level of understanding and analysis.

For more suggestions about teaching the literature program to students with learning disabilities, please consult the second part of the complete document, as well as the webcast on Working with Students with Learning Disabilities, on the TLC site in the folder of the same name (Working with Students with Learning Disabilities).