Touch and Feel: Adapting our Guided Reading Texts

Another Donors Choose project up and running! 

Adapted Version of The Snowy Day

This whole year has been one long exploration into how best to bring reading to students with low incidence disabilities such as autism and intellectual disabilities. It started with trying to adapt our read aloud texts to make them more engaging for my students. After working together with a great team we're getting ready to spend time this summer adapting actual guided reading texts.

Max Cleans Up turned into a touch and feel book

Our school ordered the guided reading books for us and they are already in our hot little hands. Now we just need the artsy materials so we can turn what would be a regular guided reading book into a multi-sensory reading experience to engage our readers. We've put up a Donors Choose project and we're over halfway to our goal (shameless plug: if you donate this week your donation is matched. We have $61 to go, but if you type in INSPIRE as the code at checkout your donation will double.)

Poor man's adapted guided reading book. This summer we'll use velcro to let the kids match words into the texts.

Adapted Miss Nelson is Missing

In my adventures with adapting regular texts this year I learned that the glue, even a glue gun, doesn't stick well to laminated pages. However foam stickers do. The Donors Choose project will get us sheets of sticky back foam paper, foam number and alphabet stickers, foam sticker shapes, and foam sticker animals. It will also get us Wikki Sticks and our own copy of Rhyming Dustbunnies that we'll throw into our pool of texts to adapt this summer.

We are ridiculously excited about our work this summer. Not only will we be adapting text but we'll be working with a reading specialist and a general education kindergarten teacher on making our literacy block model a general education balanced literacy approach. We're leading a training on this in July as well as a series of trainings next year.