"Those of us who teach in culturally diverse schools, what are we doing to scaffold instruction for our learners? What do we perceive their needs to be?"
Take care, Bill Ivey Stoneleigh-Burnham School Bill, The majority of our school uses a commercially produced set of graphic organizers called L.I.N.K.S to help kids with: essays, note-taking, story writing, etc. The other 6th grade - special ed. teacher I work with who has kids who are lower cognitively and spend the bulk of their day with her, uses Project READ for literature and writing. In my academic support classes, which teaches them strategies to read and write in their mainstream classes, I find the longer I work with kids who also speak a different language at home, in addition to their learning challenges, the more I need to 'set up" inferential thinking skills and subsequent written responses in a structured format for them. They often are so confused about where to find information to help them answer higher order thinking skills type questions, so this is my starting point...On a positive note: When we do open response type journal questions in LA I'm finding they love to create their own topics and prompts. The exciting part of this is that since returning from Christmas break, they are writing longer and with more enthusiasm, which makes me very excited and proud :) Laurie Wasserman, NBCT/TLN Grade 6 Special Needs Teacher Medford, Massachusetts [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive
