Teaching Special Education Reading and Writing the Howard Earl Gardner Way
For what immediately follows, I would like to ask you to accompany me on a special learning journey -- a short academic trip to a special education land not too distant from Canada's capital city of Ottawa. I know that you are probably quite a busy person, as we hurry here and there with our daily lives, thus I shall not take up too much of your time -- only a short while to highlight briefly how I once approached some of Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences (MI) as I taught oral reading and reading understanding to a small group of public school special grade four learners.
All of the girls and boys who were registered under my educational charge, at that time, were identified by my (state-funded public) school board as 'exceptional' learners, more precisely, as pupils supposedly 'possessed' by that negative and awful educational classification, namely learning disability (LD). I say 'supposedly' deliberately because, in my minds, their LD label also represented a positive cognitive avenue, in that they learned differently. But according to my employer of the time, all of them were slotted as LD students. Amongst numerous other learning limitations, their overall reading scores were located approximately two (2) grade points below their chronologically aged grade four (4) peers. As the school's Junior Composite Program (Special Education) teacher, it was my professional duty to upgrade their overall oral reading, reading comprehension, and cursive writing skills. And since they had continuously encountered numerous academic and social problems learning to read via conventional classroom ways, it became my task to find an alternate way for them to do reading.
The rest of my story is history and, unlike many traditional classroom ways of teaching reading, indeed needs to be repeated here. What therefore follows is my comment on these special youngsters and how they enjoyed reading. The resulting activities worked well: the students, their regular grade four classroom teacher and their parents were all pleased with the final accomplishments.
Here is my MI story
Once upon a time, a few years ago, inside an old portable classroom, I had eight (8) special students (four boys and four girls) perform the following reading activities. I wanted to reinforce within them the real meaning of what it actually meant to UNDERSTAND the words of a speaker in a short story ... especially the words spoken within the quotation marks of a story's character. Overall, I felt that the activities approached four (4) of Gardner's eight (8) intelligences, namely linguistic-verbal, bodily-kinaesthetic, visual-spatial, and interpersonal intelligence. For this program, each student was asked to construct one small hand puppet who would eventually bring "alive" a part of the regular grade four Language Arts program. But wait, I am getting ahead of myself here. Let us stop and go back to the beginning ... strreeetcchh out somewhat the scchhhoooolllll year ... and see what actually transpired.
During the second week in September, I selected as my special reading program the Merrill Reading Skilltext Series. As an entrance point, I selected from this remedial language program, the Carlos reader (readability level 3). To the reader not familiar with special education packages for elementary school-aged LD children, the Merrill series represents a logically planned supplementary skills reading program well used for many years by special education teachers who work closely with youngsters from grades one through six. The rationale behind selecting this program was to provide exciting program materials that would steadily upgrade word decoding, oral reading, vocabulary development, reading comprehension, phonics, and practical study skills, in short, overall language development. All of my special, or 'exceptional' learners were limited in most of these areas. The Merrill program achieved these objectives by providing carefully devised, systematic, skill development exercises based on interesting and motivating one paged stories. The Carlos reader represented just one of the many readers in the program.
I sought a remedial grade four reading program with interesting stories, specifically a reader with one paged episodes that would be motivating, short and easy to read. The Carlos reader was not only at their readability level but this reader seemed practical, in that within every episode, a little boy called Carlos continued as the main character and hero. I enjoy stories with a hero! Before explaining the five steps, a short historical background about Carlos, the hero. One Saturday morning while with his mother at her place of work, a little boy called Carlos convinced her to let him purchase and bring home an old rusty and broken down robot. After repairing the 'piece of junk' to its original form, Carlos decided to train the robot to be his personal assistant. He thus labelled the robot MOSH (short for My Own Special Helper). In each of the 42 stories of this reader, Carlos tries, usually unsuccessfully, to train MOSH to complete many household and neighbourhood chores. My students easily identified with the contents of these stories!
Here then are the five steps that we followed throughout the course of the school year.
Step I: Reading aloud to students
During our daily language classes of the Fall school term, we read aloud 25 of the 43 stories from the Carlos reader. Every student had a Carlos reader/workbook. First, I would read aloud the story. As I read out loud, everyone had to follow the printed text from their own Carols booklet. Sometimes, for added enjoyment, I would pre-recorde a story onto an audio tape. In this way, I was better able to observe the eye-text connection of the students. More to that important latter point, I could, at a glance, command them to pay closer attention to the typed paragraphs. Their auditory and visual learning channels were always in joint operation, in that their ears were in close contact with the sounds of the words as their eyes saw the printed text. Moreover, close attention was continuously given to the tone, intonation, and the speed of reading aloud and what the simple sentences actually meant. Restated slightly differently and to echo one of Gardner's central themes that permeate most of his writings, a special concern was always given to the UNDERSTANDING of what was firstly read out loud. For this task, the story's main characters became more central than the plot or setting.
Whenever the text contained a quote from one of the characters, I, would, as the reference reader, attempted to alter the tone of my voice to try to represent the intended actions of that character. For example, if the text stated that someone shouted something, I raised my voice into a scream as I verbalized aloud the contents within the quotation marks. Next, each student read the same story aloud, always attempting to change their voices slightly to mimic what the character was trying to state. In this way I was trying to move these youngsters to another and somewhat deeper reading level ... a level beyond the initial word decoding and oral reading phase.
Step II: Word search puzzles as a spelling aid
Once the students had read the story aloud, they then completed a word puzzle, the words being from the story just read. I used this puzzle activity as a vocabulary builder and spell-well drill. To develop the word search puzzle, pairs of pupils had to select key words from each story and type them into a word search computer application. A student selected a partner, both sat in front of a computer monitor, opened their Carlos reader to the story of the day, and typed their more preferred 25 vocabulary words into a puzzle-maker application. Each word had to contain at least six letters.
Once the words were typed and checked for correctness, the students were then allowed to include in the same puzzle their own special words--words such as their initial names and surnames and those of their friends, the names of their parents, their teachers, their street names, etc. Next, a hard copy of the printed puzzle (including one copy of the answer sheet) was generated. After receiving a copy of the puzzle, each student had to search the puzzle for the words, listed alphabetically below the puzzle maze. The words were arranged vertically, horizontally, and diagonally within the maze. And to increase visual awareness and visual attention to fine detail, an additional option, allowing words to be placed backwards in the puzzle, was activated. To assist in learning how to spell each word, the students had to circle each letter in every word. If a student could not locate a word within sixty seconds, s/he could go and sit in an empty desk to seek the answer sheet for the correct word location.
Once the words were located, any ten (10) words were finally singled out and studied as homework for the weekly Friday morning Spelling Bee. In all of the aforementioned, I was only attempting to approach Gardner's linguistic-verbal intelligence, constantly using many of his other (eight) intelligences as motivating entry points. All of this was initiated during the first and second school term. It was not until April of Term II that I felt that the students were ready for the final and, as it turned out, the most enjoyable part of this special education language project.
Step III: Selecting an interesting story
Having read many of the stories from the Carlos reader, the students were now asked to select a story that they best enjoyed. For each student, I made an enlarged photocopy of their one page selection. Then, they highlighted all the words within the quotation marks from that selection. Next, the Special Education Teacher's Assistants (SETA) assigned to my class, had each student read over the selected story, always reinforcing the tone, intonation, and feelings of the words that were placed within each set of quotations. Before discussing the next phase, a personal aside is of interest. One of the most important aspects in teaching special education youngsters to read is to have them read out loud on a daily basis ... I repeat, on a daily basis. By hearing their own out loud verbalizations, I felt that they were better able to grasp the overall contextual meaning of each sentence.
Step IV: Constructing hand puppets
My central objective for using this series of readers was to upgrade not just oral reading skills but to provide these learning disabled youngsters with another way for understanding all of what was being read aloud. To achieve that ultimate learning outcome, the students sat down in the center of the classroom, on a small green carpet. The carpet was new, clean and comfortable to sit on. There, we proceeded to design and construct eight hand puppets, at least one puppet per pupil. Used socks, small brown paper bags, old shoe laces, right hand and left hand scissors, buttons, and glue were brought in from home and used in the construction of the puppets.
Step V: Videotaping a puppet show
Finally, the puppets were used to act out the main characters for each of their selected stories. In turn, each student went behind a small stage and, using their hand puppets, verbalized out loud those sentences as located inside of the quotation marks of their selected story. The eight students had to work as a unit. They had to be polite to each other, cooperative, work with others quietly behind the stage curtain, read aloud their highlighted sentences, and, at the same time, manipulate a hand puppet. I felt that this exercise approached Gardner's social-interpersonal intelligence. In other words, my special education students "did the talking while their puppets did the walking." During all of this, I had a parent of one of the students videotape all. Gardner's visual-spatial and bodily-kinaesthetic intelligences were also being approached via this puppet exercise. To top it all off, a father of one of the girls in the group was kind enough to made eight video copies from our original video. The next Friday afternoon after recess, we had a class party and watched our video. As they walked out of the classroom, each of them received their own personalized copy of the video. That evening, their parents watched them read ... on TV!
This page was last revised on Friday, 16 January, 2009
Copyright © 2002, 2009 by Clifford Morris