Powerful Pedagogy and Practice for Special Education & Special Needs Students
LitCamp’s philosophy is rooted in educational equity and a commitment to supporting high-quality education for all learners. The LitCamp philosophy is that we are creating a strengths-based environment for all our special education students, not a deficit model. LitCamp’s signature commitment to the confluence of social-emotional and academic skill-building means that from the moment a student enters into the LitCamp community, they feel a profound sense of belonging, safety, and joy.
LitCamp includes rich and varied opportunities for campers to build their speaking and listening skills as they discuss or experience authentic stories from a wide array of culturally responsive and dignifying perspectives. Campers build language skills during the Opening and Closing Campfires that are the bookends of the LitCamp day, as well as during the lesson components Bring the Text to Life and Community Lit. Here, campers play word games, learn new songs and chants, and participate in intentional conversations. During Reading Power and Bunk Time, campers acquire strategies to read fluently and familiarize themselves with concepts of written language with culturally responsive authentic texts. Each day, they are supported in their comprehension and analysis of text through engaging lessons that utilize a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction texts to teach the skills and strategies that allow them to approach and understand new texts in all genres. Finally, the Writing Power component guides students to draw and write daily, giving them purposeful practice in writing and sharing their language in a supported environment.
Each component of a LitCamp lesson deepens the learning, engagement, and agency of all students with special needs.
LitCamp offers targeted support for special needs students to ensure that they can participate fully as valued members of the LitCamp community. Each LitCamp Leader’s Guide illuminates areas that can be adapted and tailored for our students’ reading and writing on different levels. Examples of support strategies include providing photographs and other meaningful visual and oral supports so that students who learn best in different modalities can feel a true sense of accomplishment and belonging. LitCamp supports the design of standards-based educational experiences that are student-centered. Each LitCamp lesson offers suggestions for scaffolds and customization to deepen the learning and experience. Children with special needs are immersed in rich, meaningful talk about books, and have varied ways to demonstrate their competence through their writing, drawing, speaking, and game-playing participation. Every LitCamp lesson is created so that students develop critical reading, writing, listening, speaking, and comprehension skills at an appropriate individual pace. LItCamp takes students on a gentle and guided journey through literacy scaffolding while celebrating their natural motivation, curiosity, and confidence. The hallmark Seven Strengths Framework is the centerpiece of LitCamp. Belonging, Curiosity, Friendship, Confidence, Courage, and Hope all provide a safety net for our special needs students to practice their skills and bond with others. LitCamp identifies specific vocabulary that campers might be unfamiliar with and defines these terms using multiple modalities so the campers will more fully appreciate the text. LitCamp’s discussion prompts and scaffolded questions emphasize the importance of clarifying information and coaching into the text so all campers can understand and analyze the text in meaningful ways. Techniques for the teacher’s coaching include identifying words or expressions with multiple meanings, and determining meaning dependent on context. The instructional read-aloud is a core component of LitCamp, encouraging, immersing, marinating, and inviting students into a world of text. Students engage with the text tactically and are given many ways to pay close attention to words, phrases, and sentences, in addition to the big ideas in each book. The interactive nature of the read-aloud strengthens listening comprehension skills and pushes students to make connections between words and ideas. The Bring the Text to Life activity further requires students to grasp the ideas and connections set forth in the interactive read-aloud. In addition to using their listening skills, students use this time to playfully express how they have processed the language and ideas of the read-aloud. Additionally, this activity fosters meaningful oral language development and builds vocabulary.
During each lesson, students have time to independently read and write to practice skills that meet their specific learning needs. By reading texts that campers are personally interested in, they are excited to make connections and identify ideas of increasing complexity. During independent writing, campers work on building their skills from simple phrases to richer, more complex sentences while gaining a deeper understanding of language use and craft. There is always a sense of empathy and understanding and acceptance in the LitCamp philosophy. Through critical and creative writing opportunities, students practice in a variety of genres to the best of their abilities, including narratives, opinion writing, poems, and informational texts. During their writing activities campers are encouraged, if their special needs make writing challenging, to express and draw their ideas by whatever means would be possible for them, These authentic writing opportunities encourage students to reflect on their own community in a social-emotional context and to feel a sense of purpose and dignity in their life stories and experiences. LitCamp activities are designed to delivered standards-based instruction that draws on students’ linguistic, community, and cultural assets to enable campers to express themselves in a wide variety of areas, as well as build connections and learn skills in environments that feel comfortable for them (e.g., through speaking and listening) and then transferring these skills to a different area of learning (e.g., independent reading). LitCamp creates a nurturing learning environment where all students thrive and improve in whatever manner feels most comfortable and developmentally appropriate for them. LitCamp cherishes the diversity of special education/special needs learners by honoring their small and big steps forward as learners—as literacy learners, yes, but also in the fullness of their whole lives and the glorious and meaningful specialness of their spirits and presence with us in this LitCamp experience, no matter what their challenges might be. Special education students are more than included in the LitCamp community—they are central to our thinking and to our work. They belong, they learn, they thrive, and we celebrate them each and every day, nurturing their gifts and their strengths, their resilience and their courage, and every single day we work together to advance their learning and capacities and to be with them on this journey.
4314-01 5/21
Page i Page ii Page 1 Page 2Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs