Course 3: Instructional Strategies

Diverse Materials

Including a wide range of literacy materials relating to a student’s school, home, and local community means everyone has access to topics and formats they are familiar with and are interested in. These may be photos of local buildings or parks, information from local museums or places of interest, menus from local restaurants, or flyers from stores. All add to the richness of literacy materials.

For example, one Kindergarten classroom is using branded take-out cups and menus to create a coffee shop in their literacy centre. The students use their real life experiences and their imagination to practice purposeful literacy skills. This recognizes the meaningful role of functional literacy or ordering your large coffee has in students’ and educators’ daily lives. Of course with older students, this type of literacy learning would take place at the local coffee shop they would ordinarily visit.

Here are some general ways students can engage with everyday literacy materials:

• Make a choice between two books
• Find objects that relate to an activity or story
• Make a choice for a field trip activity using tourist pamphlets or maps

Range of Tools

Another strategy is to make a wider range of accessible tools available for creating textual literacy, as well as additional materials to help your students participate in the activity.

Here's one example of an educator supporting the inclusion of another student by using a scented marker to encourage interaction.

AAC: Core and Sight Words

The inclusion of a student’s AAC in classrooms is a good example of how to make an inclusive literacy rich environment. One AAC system that is frequently a part of the literacy environment in the classroom is a Core Vocabulary Board.

A Core Vocabulary Board, or Core Words, is an AAC tool that has picture symbols of the spoken words that we use daily. Students with complex needs learn best when these words are taught in context in their literacy environment. Reading with students gives them opportunities to learn sight words, as many are also core words.

Some of these core and sight words are: I, me, you, help, want, play, look, go, in, see, where, what, eat, yes, no, up, like, not, here, this.

Teaching sight words that are also core words gives students more opportunities to interact with texts, such as:

• Answering yes/no questions using Core Words or AAC
• Sharing their enjoyment by smiling, looking, making eye-contact or using core words
• Looking at or pointing to text
• Looking at or pointing to sight words on the page
• Looking at or pointing to core words to say “turn the page,” “more,” or “finished”

Increase the Range of Literacy Materials

Using a variety of literacy materials gives students multiple ways to participate in classroom activities. This could mean finding alternative materials for students with complex needs. 

Students with Cortical Visional Impairment (CVI) or low vision can benefit from large print books or highlighting portions of the book for easier access to the information. They may also benefit from audiobooks or books from Google Read & Write to support their access to literacy. Students with a hearing loss can benefit from adding signs for key words or from a service such as Closed Captioning. Adding additional concrete information can help to strengthen their understanding of visual literacies, such as when viewing videos or looking at photos.

Elementary students can explore books such as the Levelled Books from PM Reading and digital options such as Raz-Kids to broaden their access and engage their interest. As students move into intermediate or secondary grades, use graphic novels, wordless books, and add magazines. This makes sure that chronological age-appropriate materials remain the focus.

The following short video demonstrates how a teacher can support literacy and how a student discovers ways they can use technology in novel ways to increase their engagement with the words in the book.

Collaboration with Team

Collaborating with families and considering the local community is a way to ensure these literacy materials reflect social and cultural themes relating to the student’s home.

Collaborating with others on the student’s team can make sure that literacy materials include issues of disability and diversity. For example, the ELL teacher might suggest adding literacy materials available in Arabic or Mandarin and the speech and language pathologist might suggest a book about children who use AAC.