Winnie White, a veteran teacher, creates customized big books in PowerPoint for K-3 students with intellectual disabilities, embedding core words and AAC prompts so non-verbal learners can practice language while stronger readers tackle more challenging text. Her consistent lesson flow pairs shared reading with songs, videos, and anchor charts to teach plant parts and print conventions using free tools and existing school technology.
Chapters
Have you ever heard of the book Comprehensive Literacy for All: Teaching Students with Significant Disabilities How to Read and Write? It's written by Dr. Karen Erickson and Dr. David Copenhagen. Well, my name is Winnie White, and I have been teaching reading for the past 27 years, but the last 4 years I have been in a self-contained classroom teaching a variety of grades, kindergarten to 3rd grade. So I had to do things a bit differently in order to meet the needs of my students here who have mild to moderate Moderate Intellectual Disabilities. In that book, they provide a framework for how to approach reading and writing in a different way than I did when I was in the general education classroom. I want to talk about one of those pieces to their puzzle called shared reading. Well, shared reading is when you use large print. Back in the '90s when I first started reading and teaching reading, we had lots of big books I made a ton of charts. I actually made a lot of big books myself. But that shared reading experience was a way to model teaching, model reading, fluent reading skills. It's also a great way to bring in that word work so that you can work on, like for example, word families or how to decode words. It's another good way to encourage conversations and predictions and understanding understanding setting and characters, all those things that you want a good reader to be able to do. Well, in my classroom here, I, I really like using shared reading for my content curriculum. I use the Autism Helper curriculum for science and also for social studies, and I will do 2 weeks of science and 2 weeks of social studies. I really like for my shared reading to connect to those content areas. I'll go in and I'll look at my state standards for science for these grades and/or social studies, depending on which week I'm in, and I will use that vocabulary in my shared reading and create something that will meet the needs of each of my students. 'Cause I have students that range from Guided Reading A all the way to Guided Reading H my classroom.
So let's take a few minutes looking at, um, Science Level 1 Unit 3 curriculum, um, from The Autism Helper. This is all about plants and body parts. I am currently in this unit, and what I like to do is create something that will include the pictures from my anchor chart and the content from the standards, from our state standards for science in grades 1 through 3. But I like to adapt the reading to be on my students' reading levels. So I will open a PowerPoint. I've already created a book, so I'm gonna talk to you about that, how I get my book to match my anchor charts. So I use PowerPoint to create my shared reading. I love this font because this font has letters the way I teach them how to write. It is a free font that I downloaded from— I just went to Google and I typed in KG Red Hands. That is a nice font that if you use— I use a PC product, so I will download the font and then I will upload that font into my fonts folder, and then I'll be able to use those— that same font across all Microsoft products like PowerPoint and Publisher and Word. But since I am using my unit from the Autism Helper in about plants, I will— I like to take a screenshot of this using the snipping tool that comes with Word. I mean, that comes with Microsoft. I will click New and just take a picture of right here of what I want the COVID of my book to be. I will copy it right here. This button copies in Snipping Tool. I go to PowerPoint and then I paste it and I type in my title. And then it's really cool because the Design tab will give me all of these cool designer options over here to the right. And you can see I've already chosen what I want, so I'm not gonna change that. But what I did was I chose this background because I thought it was really effective for my content, which is about plants. So I'm gonna go to the next page, and what I do is at that point, I go back into my anchor chart and I take a screenshot of each one that I am discussing. I'm gonna read quickly through and kinda talk to you about why this shared reading was a good match for the readers in my classroom. A flower is part of a plant. Now I do have nonverbal students in my classroom and I have students that are minimally verbal. So a page like this, I'm looking to include vocabulary about plants, but I'm also looking to include core words. Like for example, the word is. The word "of," the word "a." These are things that I am going to let them practice saying on their AAC devices. It also is a word like "plant." That's what we call fringe vocabulary. I want to make sure it's on their devices and that I model for them how to find that. So the way they participate is really focusing on How do you find those words that come up over and over on these pages? But I also have readers who are higher readers, and I'm going to look at words that may be a little bit above their level. That's what shared reading is. It's a little bit above their level so that I can help guide them to get— how to get there when you see a new word. A bush is a plant because of all the stems and leaves. And part of our science curriculum content, we are looking at the parts of a plant. We're looking at stems, leaves, and flowers, and roots. When I look at the tree, it says, "A tree is a plant because it has roots, a stem, which is the trunk, and leaves." We're gonna talk about how sentences start with capital letters and how sentences end with periods. This is all things that I have written that help to develop the concepts of plants that may end up showing up in their worksheets as well. We always start with a song about our content, and then we go into a short video, whether it's from BrainPOP or YouTube, that helps me discuss the different concepts that I'm working on, and then we go over the anchor chart and do our shared reading. And from our shared— after our shared reading, I like to then do a worksheet with them to reinforce whatever we have been learning about from the anchor chart and in our shared reading. It just all flows together. And as you can see, this is a lot of— it's not a lot of writing. Because most all of my students in my classroom are at level 1 when it comes to science and social studies. So we're reinforcing vocabulary. This is tree. This is also a tree. And this is a tree. So tree can show up in different ways, but it's still a tree because of the trunk and the leaves. You can identify it as a tree. I'm also using their AAC devices and going in and showing them where the word tree and leaves and roots and plants are. So let's finish up with this shared reading lesson. This is the next page, and it's— I don't do a lot of pages because it is higher content, and I want to keep it simple. As you can see, it's not really a lot of pattern reading because of my students who are at higher levels. I want to make sure I reach their needs as well. But a leaf is part of a plant. You can see the stem in the leaf. And then the last page is, "A vine is a plant because it has roots, stems, and leaves." That shared reading cost me nothing other than time.
I already had the resources because we already have the Curriculum Access, and I already had my computer. I have access to Microsoft products through our school. So this was an easy way for me to use my tools that I already have in my classroom to do something that is very important. I encourage you to give this a try. Use the materials that you already have, whether you have Microsoft products or if you have Google products. Create shared reading that you can do with your students and incorporate that science, incorporate that social studies. It's a great way to get your shared reading in every day.
