Sasha Long, a former special education teacher, introduces Roadmap to Reading, an online course for educators and parents teaching reading to autistic and special-needs learners in pre-K through 6th grade. The five-module curriculum includes over 30 videos, 100+ downloadable templates, and six months of access to a community and app.
Hi, I'm Sasha Long, former special education teacher and board-certified behavior analyst. I am so excited to share with you all about my course, The Roadmap to Reading. This online course will teach you to create a path and a plan for teaching reading to your learners with special needs. Creating a course on reading was something that was really important to me because there is so little information out there on evidence-based practices and best strategies to use when teaching reading to learners with autism and learners with special needs. I know from my experience the huge opportunities that teaching reading will open up for your students—opportunities for friendships, for inclusion, for more jobs. Reading is everything, and we need to teach reading in a functional way that will generalize to new environments and new people. And that's exactly what this course teaches. This course teaches how to look at the individual needs of each of your learners and create a path that works for them. Based on their skill sets. This course was created for educators, clinicians, and homeschooling parents who have students or learners with special needs or autism who are working on reading skills. The content within this course will focus on reading skills between pre-K and 6th grade. That's the type of strategies that I'll be teaching. Now, if you have learners who are older than 6th grade but are working at reading on a more foundational level, this course will still be for you. Let's say you are a high school teacher, but some of your students are reading at a 3rd, 4th, 5th grade level. In this course, I'm going to teach you how to differentiate and adapt the resources that— and strategies that I'll be teaching you for your older students. So this will still be a good fit. This course really focuses on teaching skills and assessing reading for students that have verbal skills and students that do not use verbal communication as, as their main means to communicate. So there's going to be a lot of different strategies and accommodations and options for differentiation for your learners who are non-verbal or have limited verbal abilities. So if those are your learners, this course is for you too. I want your learners to have those reading readiness skills if they are ready for the Roadmap to Reading. I want them to be able to sit, to be able to attend, to have a reliable form of communication, whether that be AAC or sign or gestures or verbal communication. I want some reliable communication. We need some good fine motor skills, imitation, and following simple directions. If your learners have those skills, they are ready for the Roadmap to Reading. So now let me dive into some of the details of everything that is included within this course. When you sign up, you will get 6 months access to this course. This course is broken up into 5 modules with over 30 training videos. I broke up this complex topic of reading into short, manageable pieces. The training content is available in video format, cap— closed caption version, audio only, and written transcript. You will have access to this course on our brand new website and our brand new app. You have the option to use both, so you can use this course on your laptop at school, be watching videos, printing resources, and then on your commute home you can listen to the next training video just like a podcast from our app, or then that night watch it from your tablet at your house. It will all sync up and you have the option to utilize both platforms. Within this new platform, we also have a community. This community is filled with educators just like you who are looking to level up. You can share your quick wins, you can troubleshoot, you can ask questions. Everyone is available and wanting to learn just like you. This course also includes over 100 pages of downloads and templates within the training content. I love to teach a best practice and then give you the tools to put it right into action. So those tools are all included for you. There is also the option to add on 4 different toolkits. I have an assessment that we created specifically with your students in mind. It's just so great. I'm so excited about it. This informal assessment will look at visual comprehension, written comprehension, verbal comprehension. It's just really expansive. Then there are 3 options for instructional bundles at different grade levels. There's more information on those toolkits farther down on this page.
