Open Doors For Visual Learners!
Help Special Needs Children Enter The World Of Reading...
My Students...
Do you remember the colorful images of your favorite childhood story? My special needs students not only need the pictures to enhance their reading, but they depend on picture support to read and get a better understanding of their surroundings. It is such a joy to watch the magic happen!
My kids range from age 15 to 21 and attend a life skills program at a public high school in Maryland. Students can spend up to 7 years in my classroom. In a small group environment, they receive instruction based on an alternative, adapted, and functional curriculum which is intended to help prepare them for independent living.
My students are a unique combination of amazing characters who make my day. They work hard to overcome obstacles others don't notice and put smiles on faces around them.
My students love books, but struggle with reading as they learn in a different way. With every type of instructional activity, picture support is vital. We work with social stories to understand expected behaviors and to make sense of the actions of people around us. These social stories are generally created in the classroom to adapt them specifically to the students' needs.
My Project...
As a new teacher starting later in the school year, I hit the ground running. While my classroom is huge, it is also bare and is missing many pieces that make it more welcoming and functional. A color printer can enhance my students' lives by enabling me to print out images and picture supported texts. With picture support many of my students are able to read and get a deeper understanding of the text. I would be able to create adapted books to start a classroom library for our non-readers. I could print out authentic student work and let students' share their hard work with their peers.
The donations to this project will improve my classroom by opening doors of information to our visual learners. It would make my students' lives better by turning it from black and white into colorful. My students' access to the general public is very limit. That is why a color printer could help recreate real life situations to better prepare them for their life outside school. Your donations could really make a difference in getting my students ready for the world.