I too am reading this thread with great interest. When Dana mentioned her lack of connections to her school law class - I immediately thought of many of my special needs sixth graders who appear not to care about learning in general. So do they not care because they have had so many experiences at not understanding? Does their lack of understanding come from lack of connections to that which was being taught? If we were to continue to unravel this ball of yarn, would we find the inner core back somewhere in preschool or kindergarten where these same children were asked to derive meaning from printed text long before they had adequately developed language to engage successfully in phonological processing? I think many of my students would fail into that category. Many of my students are much better at math than reading and writing. They can compute with the best of them. They can locate patterns and manipulate numbers but they are unable to articulate the process by which they derived their answer. They have difficulty with vocabulary, particularly in problem solving situations. So I am wondering, how do I lead them into what it really means to understand - to in their words "get it" It appears they have had only rare "aha" moments. Keep the thoughts coming. June 6th Grade Special Needs Resource KY
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