Step 6: Create laminated topic boards for the book to support receptive understanding during classroom read-alouds and discussion. Alternatively you can leave the book in digital form and activate a text-to-speech reader to support the student’s listening comprehension. Make a cover for the book and insert it into the clear pocket on the front of the binder. Step 5: Print the book in color, slip the pages into clear transparencies, and insert them into a 3-ring binder. Step 4: Copy and paste the images above the words that you want to enhance with visual support.You may need to change the spacing of the words in the text to accommodate the pictures. It’s important to know that the purpose of this adapted version is to promote participation in buddy reading, read-alouds, and comprehension, not to teach decoding of individual words. Be sure to create extra line spaces in the document to insert pictures above the words the student doesn’t know. Adapt the visual look of the adapted text by creating more white space between letters, words, or lines customizing the font or manipulating the color of the font and background. The Snap&Read Universal app (Don Johnston, n.d.) allows you or the student to do dynamic text leveling and reduce the difficulty of the text even further than Rewordify. If you need to reduce the reading level of the text, use Rewordify (, n.d.). If you need to reduce the amount of text further, use a free online text summarizer like Auto Summarize (Tools 4 Noobs, 2016). If the chapter summary looks like it will work for your student, go on to Step 3. Find a chapter summary on the Spark Notes or Schmoop website and cut and paste it into a new Word document. conditional sentences (i.e., those that use and, but, and not)īecause rewriting from scratch–going through every page of every chapter and writing summaries–takes a lot of time, there are two free online tools that make the task more efficient.words that have multiple meanings and other forms of figurative language.sentences with only one independent clause.Considerations for simplifying text (Schuster & Erickson, 2014) include: Step 2: Rewrite the story in Microsoft Word or another word-processing program, keeping most or all of the essential story elements such as characters, settings, and major events. Save the Word images document in a file called “ images” for now. Do this prior to every unit of study or book that will be the subject of lessons for an extended period of time (e.g., solar system, water cycle, Civil War, or Romeo and Juliet), as you’ll need them for making the book and creating visual supports like aided language/topic boards, vocabulary activities, and adapted writing templates. Copy and paste the images into a Word document. You can find these by searching Google Images or using a symbol set like Boardmaker Picture Communication Symbols. Step 1: Create a file with images that relate to the book. (This will also appear in my upcoming Brookes Publishing book on inclusion.) She provided students with free chapter summaries on the SparkNotes website.įor the student who needed a highly modified version of the book, the speech-language pathologist created one using a 6-step process, described below. This helped her whole class supplement the read-alouds they did during class time with out-of-class preview and review when they were riding the bus or studying at home. To make the book accessible to every student in her class, the teacher had all students install a free app called Natural Reader (Natural Soft Limited, 2015) onto their iPads or iPhones. The majority of her planning work for this unit was done even before the students began reading, using the principles of universal design. Her class was diverse and included students who routinely got As, students who typically were not attentive in class, and one student who had complex support needs. Here’s how one tenth-grade teacher accomplished both goals while planning and delivering a unit about social justice anchored in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee, 1960). Two cornerstone practices in inclusive education are making instructional materials accessible and making classroom lessons engaging. Read on, and get some practical tips you can use in your own lesson planning! Cheryl’s here to share the story of a high-school teacher who used universal design principles to make her lessons more engaging and accessible for all her students. I’m pleased to welcome a special guest to the Inclusion Lab today: Cheryl Jorgensen, Ph.D., inclusion expert and author of The Beyond Access Modeland The Inclusion Facilitator’s Guide.
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