Examples of Overall Difficulties

• Short attention span and/or struggle to pay attention

• Appear to have poor listening skills

• Difficulty carrying out long or multi-step directions

• Often need more time to process information presented orally

• Exhibit behavior problems

• Behave as if they have a hearing loss

• Respond to speech inconsistently

• Frequently request repetition of verbal information

• Often misunderstand what is said

• Difficulty locating sounds

• Difficulty making out the teacher’s voice against the background noise from other students such as shuffling papers, opening notebooks, or making other noises

• Low academic performance

• Difficulty remembering information such as directions, lists, or study materials

• Difficulty learning a foreign language

• Difficulty understanding directions in lunchroom, hallway, and playground

• Difficulty in work group when more than one person is talking

Overall Strategies

• Teach the student strategies to compensate for the auditory deficit such as recording class lectures, how to ask for repetition, and how to use visual cues (look and listen)

• Teach listening skills, including when to listen for meaning rather than exact repetition

• Teach methods to enhance auditory comprehension and memory: (e.g., chunking, verbal chaining, mnemonics, rehearsal, paraphrasing, summarizing)

• Teach the student to wait until instructions are completed before he/she begins a task

• Teach key words and phrases

• Counsel toward self-advocacy for listening, including recognition of adverse listening conditions and methods of dealing with them

• Teach noise tolerance skills

Accommodations

• Reduce background noise and reverberation

• Allow the student to move to a seat near the speaker

• Give “alert” cues such as calling the student’s name, saying "Listen” and “Are you ready?” or another prearranged signal before giving information or assignments

• Have the student paraphrase directions or summarize major points of the lesson

• Use a slower speaking rate

• Insert pauses to allow the student to catch-up

• Use consistent visual aides and cues

• Rephrase and restate important information to provide auditory redundancy

• Build in “wait time” and give the student time to think and respond to auditory instructions or questions

• Avoid or modify oral tests

• Limit the amount of information in each instruction by using key words and phrases

• Present only one or two tasks or directions at one time

• Provide an overview of the “big picture” by sharing the goal of each lesson

• Allow a “buddy system” that the student can use to check on homework assignments or other instructions

• Reserve a space in the room to post procedures, assignments, and homework and teach students to refer to this spot

• Consider the use of recording devices for students who need a repetition of directions, spelling words, or lectures

• Provide pre-printed or skeletal lecture notes or outlines to minimize the need to listen and write or take notes

• Highlight important information using colored highlighters

• Color code folders, types of assignments, etc.

• Avoid expressions from foreign languages

Examples of Math Difficulties

• Difficulty with sequencing (students expend so much energy taking in information that they have little energy for manipulating or analyzing)

• Difficulty comprehending verbal math problems

• Difficulty completing multi-step problems

• May mix-up numbers with the same digits (84 and 48)

Math Strategies

• Pre-teach new vocabulary/concepts

• Teach cognitive/visual mapping and non-linguistic representations

• Teach students to rehearse and over-learn new information

  • 1. Verbal rehearsal-voiced or using inner voice

    2. Elaborative rehearsal-associate information with prior knowledge

• Model problem-solving through think aloud activities

Accommodations

• Present skills from concrete to abstract

• Present information with a retrieval cue-such as category labels

• Provide retrieval practice

• Allow the use of a number line or calculator

• Highlight key words and ideas on worksheets

• Provide examples by modeling or demonstrating and leave the example on display

• Use printed instructions that are easy to read and understand (use short, simple language)

• Using a large graphic format, have students walk through math computations drawn on the floor to gain an understanding of the organizational framework

• Use familiar objects to set up and solve math problems

• Consider using flash cards or computer programs to practice basic math facts

• Re-write word problems using short sentence and simple language

• Provide or help the student develop a visual dictionary

Examples of Reading Difficulties

• Difficulty differentiating phonemes

• Difficulty recognizing individual sounds in a word

• Difficulty isolating individual sounds in a word

• Difficulty identifying the number of sounds in a word

• Difficulty recognizing similarities between words (rhyming)

• Difficulty blending sounds to form words

• Omits syllables or vowels at the beginning or end of a word

• Difficulty recalling phonemes (sounds)/grapheme (letters) relationships (decoding/encoding)

• Difficulty sounding out words

• Fails to hear vowel or soft consonant sounds in spoken words (bet-bit)

• Switches sequence of sounds in words

• Appear to hear but not listen (Tell me how a couch and a chair are alike sounds like tell me how a cow and a hair are alike)

• Difficulty comprehending complex sentence structure

• Difficulty retaining new information and synthesizing discussion (in group work, from lecture)

• Difficulty remembering and summarizing what is read

• Difficulty connecting what they read to background knowledge while reading

• Difficulty with dictated assignments and assessments

• Difficulty learning words through recitation

Reading Strategies

• Expose children to sounds, music, rhythms, and language

• Teach with books that use a lot of rhyming words

• Provide opportunities to explore and manipulate sounds, words, and language (phonemic awareness)

• Use explicit, systematic, synthetic phonemic awareness and phonics instruction

• Use decodable texts for daily practice

• Teach letter/sound relationships using Elkonin boxes

• Teach reading sounds (phonemes) using a multisensory approach

  • 1. Say and push: The teacher dictates a word such as bat. The student uses manipulatives (buttons, cubes, counters, etc.) to push for each sound in the word. The teacher should stretch the word out when dictating (baaaaaaaaat). The student should push a manipulative (counter) up for each sound they hear.

    2. Say and tap: the teacher dictates a word. The student taps, claps, hops, etc. for each sound they hear in the word. The teacher may need to demonstrate until the student has an understanding.

    3. Have students clap the syllables in a word.

• Teach and use rehearsal strategies (e.g., rhymes, acronyms, anagrams, associations, mnemonics)

• Pre-teach new vocabulary/concepts and check for understanding by asking the student to use his/her own words to explain the term

• Teach using semantic story organizers and story maps

• Teach students to rehearse and over-learn new information

  • 1. Verbal rehearsal-voiced or using their inner voice

    2. Elaborative rehearsal-associate information with prior knowledge-paraphrase, create a story

• Teach guided questioning: Take turns asking and answering each others’ questions

• Model and teach checks for understanding: brain-breaks, two-minute pauses, think-pair-share, instant quizzes (white boards, true-false, yes-no, thumbs up-thumbs down)-teach the student to do their own

• Teach cognitive/visual mapping and non-linguistic representations (ex. tree diagrams, time-sequence, problem-solution, flow charts, concept webs, compare and contrast charts, etc.)

• Teach self-monitoring skills while reading, demonstrating how to stop and ask oneself if materials/words have been understood

• Teach comprehension strategies such as guided note-taking and webbing

Accommodations

• Allow the student to use books on tape/assistive technology/electronic reader, start to finish, book share

• Use flashcards for vocabulary and pair with illustrations

• Present information with a retrieval cue, such as category labels

• Provide retrieval practice

• Prepare the student for the answers to listen for by using advance organizers

• Provide scaffolded hints through cognitive coaching

Examples of Writing Difficulties

• Difficulty assigning sounds to letters which hinders the development of accurate spelling

• Difficulty with any type of dictation across all subject areas

• Difficulty noticing the language syntax and grammar as they are too occupied with processing the words

• Struggle with writing composition

Writing Strategies

• Teach and use a visual approach to correct spelling errors

• Use flash cards for spelling words and pair with illustrations

• Teach using Elkonin boxes

• Teach Cover, Copy, and Compare strategies

• Teach spelling using word groups and sorts

• Analyze grammatical errors in writing and teach to “fix” errors

• Teach the use graphic organizers to help sequence information for effective communication

• Model and teach the steps of writing through think alouds

• Use color-coding to make writing organization obvious and to connect a student’s plan to their draft

• Teach sentence composition using sentence starters

Accommodations

• Use color-coding to make writing organization obvious and to connect a student’s plan to their draft