Resources

These resources were created and/or collected by Outreach staff to assist you in better understanding how to teach students with LBLD.

  • Spelling Instruction: A Diagnostic-Prescriptive Approach

    by Paul Howard April 23, 2023 If you are around my age, you might remember spelling in elementary school as something akin to the following: Your well-intentioned teacher gave you a list of words on Monday, and on Friday she (usually she) gave you a dictated test of those (usually 10 or so) words. I

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  • Research Writing Process: Organize, Outline, and Draft

    March 1, 2023 The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) report titled Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively asserts that “Effective writing is a vital component of students’ literacy achievement, and writing is a critical communication tool for students to convey thoughts and opinions, describe ideas and events, and analyze information” (Graham et al, 2016, p.1).  

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  • A student taking purposeful research notes

    The Research Writing Process

    Updated February 13, 2023 Why do students with LD struggle with the research and writing process? In their review of recent research into writing interventions for students with learning disabilities, Amy Gillespie Rouse and Ashley Sandoval (2018) make the following observation: “Compared to their peers without learning disabilities, these students spend less time planning for

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  • The Hidden Demands of Writing

    December 12, 2022 Writing is a complex, high-level task that incorporates and synthesizes many language skills from phonemic awareness to handwriting to critical thinking and analysis. In their research to confirm the efficacy of Self-Regulated Strategy Development, Steve Graham and Karen Harris asserted that “skilled writing was a highly demanding process that was self-directed, requiring

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  • Notebook open, with pen lying across

    Research Writing: Finding and Evaluating Sources

    May 1, 2023 Writing a cohesive research paper requires an extensive amount of self-talk, self questioning, and self-monitoring. This internal language or metacognitive process can be under-developed in students with LBLD as they often allocate so much cognitive energy understanding and reading sources, as well as composing their thoughts based on this information, that they

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  • Phonemic Awareness: What is It, and How Does It Relate to Reading?

    by Courtney Anastasia-Murphy March 3, 2023 Did you know that a six month old baby can tell the difference between two words that differ by one phoneme, such as “pat” and “put”? They can make this phoneme discrimination because phonemes are the “building blocks” of spoken language, and the phonological processor in the brain is

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  • Thematic Unit Planning: A How-To Guide

    by Kate Payson and Katie Worden March 1, 2023 When teachers deliver instruction through structured thematic content with carefully chosen vocabulary, students of all ability levels can collaboratively engage in class activities to address necessary language skills. Consistent thematic instruction reduces the cognitive load on students’ working memory, aids in recall, and builds vocabulary and

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  • What to Know: Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN)

    March 21, 2022 The act of reading requires the coordination of many cognitive skills. Students must understand that words in a given language are made up of distinct, separate sounds, and that when we read and write, these sounds are represented by letters. Not only is understanding this letter/sound code important, but the rate at

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  • Putting the Decoding Toolkit to Work

    by Natalia Harrison January 4, 2023 Previously, I wrote about the importance of building a common language with students by implementing a Decoding Toolkit. The key benefit of this approach is that, once established, it allows the teacher to more efficiently deliver instruction so time is not lost in explanation and background knowledge.  Students with

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