Questions and Activities

  1. A student with autism is going to join your second grade class. You find out that he does not speak and when he is given books, he often tears the pages. Explain why it is important to presume competence in his literacy learning abilities, and describe some ways to remove barriers from this student’s participation in literacy learning.
  2. Create a lesson on early phonemic awareness for a student with short-term memory deficits and low vision. Be sure to structure your lesson so that she will get the most out of the instruction.
  3. You have a student in your class who reads fluently at grade level; however, when you ask her a question about the reading, she seems unable to answer. What are some reasons that might explain the student’s difficulty in answering? What might you do to determine whether her difficulty is due to an issue with reading comprehension, other reasons, or a combination of both?
  4. Given the situation in question 3, let’s say that you determine that the student is having trouble comprehending what she has read. Discuss some ways you can help improve her reading comprehension.