help with literacy-special needs student

I have an 8th grade student who has a cognitive deficit. She is in a 12:1:1 NYSAA class and is unable to read or even identify most letters. I have been trying to help her identify letters and put them together and since last year, she has gone from identifying 0 letters to now identifying 5 letters. Does anyone have any resources for me? TIA!!!

Re: help with literacy-special needs student

try starfall.org they have a lot of beginning literacy-related activities & materials. Also - perhaps enchanted learning, for printables.

When I have a student who doesn't know many letters, I always start with his/her name as a jumping-off point.

I also do an assessment to check receptive vs expressive letter knowledge - can she point to a letter you name? can she write a letter you name? can she name a letter you point to?

Getting a set of upper case & lowercase magnetic letters would also be helpful - do a lot of letter sorts - which have straight lines? which have circles, etc...

handwriting without tears for letter formation

HTH!

Re: help with literacy-special needs student

I would just work on her id letters, rather than putting them together right now. Start with one letter (maybe a letter of the day or something) and continuously teach that until mastery. Then add another one. Keep doing that until you have all 26 down, generalized and maintained :)

Re: help with literacy-special needs student

Looking at it in the "grand scheme" of things- you only have 1 year to work with her. I had a student with similiar deficeits (although not quite as severe). We worked on sight vocabulary. Knowing he was going into high school the next year, I wanted to get him to at least read basic sight words (he struggled with words like "that" "about" "because"). I would have loved to focus more on phonics and putting letter-sounds together but there just wasn't enough time in the year. So in an attempt to be more realistic about what he would need in H.S- we just worked on sight vocab.