Supporting the development of self-determination appears to be a promising way to promote academic success and seems to have an impact beyond the school career of students with and without learning disabilities (LDs).
This article provides a number of high leverage strategies to target oral language skills that can be adapted for classroom instruction.
Students with learning disabilities may be at greater risk for mental health problems including ADHD, anxiety, mood disorders, and interpersonal problems. Deanna Swift, from School Mental Health Ontario provides resources support educators in their efforts to create a mentally healthy classroom.
For over 20 years, research has shown that social-emotional learning should take a more important role in the classroom. Teachers should highlight the emotions felt by the characters in children's literature to promote social-emotional learning and discussions while continuing to meet academic goals.
Often, children cope with distress by gradually withdrawing from or avoiding situations, thoughts, or feelings, and engaging in behaviours like procrastination, school refusal, lying about getting work done, or feeling tired or unwell.
Consider this: you might actually be missing a lot of the student engagement that your hard work and dedication have created. Teachers need to learn how to recognize and fully appreciate the wide range of engagement that is already occurring in classrooms and in online spaces.
Phonological awareness is a crucial foundational skill in the journey of learning to read. Research shows that challenges in phonemic awareness and other phonological skills both predict and cause poor reading and spelling development and that decoding instruction may be ineffective unless children can first hear the sounds in spoken language.
The Writing Circle is an innovative teaching approach used to teach writing at the primary level, which can be adapted to support students with LDs to encourage their enjoyment of writing, activate and increase their knowledge of writing, and enable them to acquire new writing skills, both in planning and revising texts.
Reading is a significant area of need throughout Ontario schools. Too many students have gaps in too many areas of reading, impacting not only the day-to-day instruction in our classrooms, but the face of education as a whole. Direct Instruction is needed to remediate those gaps and build literate children who are equipped with a variety of strategies to decode words and comprehend ideas. In order to provide our students with the quality of reading instruction they need, we as teachers need to better understand the skills that build readers and provide consistent opportunities for practice and application.
EquatIO is truly a revolutionary tool that mathematicians have always wanted but never had. Its accessibility features allow students from all skill levels to enter into the world of mathematics, using the prior knowledge they already have. The end result, confidence and capacity building within the world of numeracy.
