Often I’ve seen students take me off guard. I’ve been assigned to work with students and told, I was wasting my time trying to teach them how to read because “they’ll never learn to.” It’s an unfair statement. It also depends on your definition of reading. Many times I have found that simple games will encourage children to read print/braille and make progress.
I had one student after a couple of years in my classroom who was reading three and four letter words, especially if they rhymed (cat, hat, sat, etc.). It’s more than others expected and a foundation for future teachers to use.
Another student was ELL (English Language Learner) and developmentally delayed. I was told by another teacher she would never learn to read as a result of these two factors. Teaching her to read was difficult. However, after three years she was reading at the first grade level and she loved it.
One student wouldn’t touch anything, so teaching her to read braille was next to impossible. I was the one forced to change to help her be successful in accessing media of any kind. As a result, I changed my definition of reading. I needed her to tolerate and touch items so she could take the steps necessary to learn to read braille. I just wanted her to tolerate the action of searching for what she wanted. Student D was always singing and I decided I would take advantage of that. I had an IntelliTools board and set it up with a Stop Sign Shape and a Play Shape and put on the computer her favorite songs. It wasn’t long before she was stopping her songs when it was time to go and getting “free” time to get onto the computer and play her songs. Next, I created a forward and back button so she could skip to the next song and put in some annoying songs for her to work around. She picked up what she needed to do for that too. I then set up the Intellitools to create animal sounds, which all the students ended enjoying. Next, I had her tell me stories from our community trips and recorded those and she had to hit the play button to get to the next page. It was not the traditional way of reading, but she was interacting with language and learning from it. She was also touching things to learn and, hopefully, that can be used to teach her to touch and then read braille.
There was another student that I did have a lot of difficulty with as she hit and bit or threw herself on the ground, so I decided to have another teacher work with her for awhile as the teacher had more time in her schedule and had a knack for working with students with these behaviors. After two months, the teacher sent me a picture of the student reading braille at her reading level fluently and smiling while doing it.
We must all admit that sometimes we are not the perfect teacher to teach all skills to our students. We can only do our best and trouble shoot what is not going well. Once the problem is determined, then a solution must be developed. Sometimes the solutions are simple, sometimes they are more complex, but our egos must be put to the side so that the students are able to make progress in needed skills.
Either way, we need to be careful of being told a student can’t do something.