Reading Connections: Strategies for Teaching Students with Visual Impairments offers an in-depth and user-friendly guide for understanding reading instruction for teachers and professionals seeking to improve the reading skills of their students who are visually impaired. The book addresses in detail the essential components of reading--phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension--as well as other key reading components and subskills. While this book addresses the needs of students who read print, braille, or both, much of the book is also consistent with strategies for teaching reading to students who have, or are at risk for, developing reading disabilities. Teachers of students with visual impairments, as well as family members and other professionals who work with children who are blind or visually impaired, will find within this book a repertoire of strategies and activities for creating a balanced, comprehensive plan of reading instruction for each student and for teaching the essential reading skills necessary for students' success.

Beginning with braille provides a wealth of effective activities for promoting literacy at the early stages of braille instruction. The text includes creative and practical strategies for designing and delivering quality braille instruction and teacher-friendly suggestions for many areas such as reading aloud to young children, selecting and making early tactile books, and teaching tactile and hand movement skills. This book also includes tips on designing worksheets, introducing braille contractions, teaching the use of the braillewriter, and facilitating the writing process in braille. Chapters also address guidelines for individualizing instruction, the literacy needs of students with additional disabilities, and assessment of student progress in developing literacy skills.

Intended for use by college and university educators, this book contains theoretical ideas and practical activities designed to enhance and promote writing across the curriculum programs. Topics discussed in the 12 major chapters are (1) conceptual frameworks of the cross writing program; (2) journal writing across the curriculum; (3) writing and problem solving; (4) assigning and evaluating transactional writing; (5) audience and purpose in writing; (6) the poetic function of language; (7) using narration to shape experience; (8) readers and expressive language; (9) what every educator should know about reading research; (10) reconciling readers and texts; (11) peer critiques, teacher student conferences, and essay evaluation as a means of responding to student writing; and (12) the role of the writing laboratory. A concluding chapter provides a select bibliography on language and learning across the curriculum. (FL)

This title introduces first-time readers of academic text to basic reading strategies such as finding paragraph topics, finding supporting details and learning to read quickly.

This book shows that reading-writing is a two-way street that is burgeoning with research activity. It provides a comprehensive and updated view on reading-writing connections by drawing on extant research and findings. It puts forward a new conception of literacy, one that establishes reading and writing connections as the primeval ground for building literacy science. It shows how an integrative view of literacy can have deep and lasting effects on conceptualizing literacy development in several orthographies and on improving literacy instruction and remediation worldwide. The book examines in detail such issues as modeling approaches to reading-writing relations, literacy development, reading and spelling across orthographies and integrative approaches to literacy instruction and remediation.

This is an edited book based on papers presented at a 2003 invitee-only conference under the sponsorship of the Merrill Advanced Studies Center of the University of Kansas. The purpose of the gathering was to discuss theoretical issues and research findi

I-M-ABLE, or the Individualized Meaning-Centered Approach to Braille Literacy Education, is an innovative, individualized, student-centered method for teaching braille and making it exciting for children who have difficulties learning braille. In this teaching approach, instruction is centered on continuously analyzing the strengths and needs of students, placing particular emphasis on engaging them using key vocabulary words and phrases based on their experiences and interests. This comprehensive practice guide provides detailed direction on how to implement the components of the approach. Teachers will find this resource invaluable for helping students with mild to moderate cognitive impairments or other difficulties make progress in braille reading and writing, and all the skills that it encompasses.