Magazines to Build Literacy Skills

In a special education context, teachers sometimes struggle for new and exciting strategies for struggling readers. Helping struggling readers can be a challenge, and it is sometimes put to one side as more pressing, physical or behavioural problems are addressed. In helping struggling readers, teachers need to understand their level of reading ability. Some may have limited reading abilities, while others cannot read at all. This is common in students with intellectual disabilities or learning disabilities, and may also occur in students with 'normal' intelligence, but who have a physical, sensory or behavioural disability.

Often these students have had excellent teaching and have participated in a wide variety of regular and specialist reading programs specifically designed for helping struggling readers. But by their teen years, some have become turned off reading entirely, as they experience frequent failure and become aware that their peers are reading at a much higher level than they are.

Classroom magazines have a lot to offer as a tool for helping struggling readers within the special education program. They can be used in a variety of ways and for individual and group based activities. Here are a few ideas that may work for you and your students:

Make folders of interesting articles on a related topic or theme, and place the folders on an easily accessible shelf in the classroom or library.

Assist students to locate interesting magazines online (using adaptive technology such as a Web page reading program if needed). This is a neat strategy for helping struggling readers, as it promotes online research independence via an interesting and appealing mechanism.

Take a visit to the local community library so students can practise the skill of finding magazines in a public library setting (remember that for some special needs learners, skills are not readily transferred from one location to another, so the opportunity to practise skills where they will ultimately be needed is a valuable one). This also helps from a community perspective, as it encourages community venues such as libraries to become more proactive in providing ways for helping struggling readers within the broader community.

Be a role model to your students by being obvious in your own interest in classroom magazines (leave classroom magazines on your desk, participate in quiet reading time by reading a classroom magazine yourself, talk about interesting articles you have read).

If you are doing work on a particular theme, try bringing in resources from a range of genres on that theme. This gives students the opportunity to enjoy gaining their information in a way which is meaningful for them. For some students, this will mean reading a fiction story, for others perhaps a taped story on CD or through an I-pod, and for others it may mean looking through a non-fiction classroom magazine. You may find that some of your learners are better able to grasp the concepts you are teaching if they are able to learn the material through a number of different genres, and to make choices and express preferences about their own learning styles and approaches which best suit their needs.

Get together with other teachers to talk about using classroom magazines as a way of helping struggling readers at your school. You may find that other teachers welcome sharing ideas and strategies for struggling readers, and pooling resources such as classroom magazines, teaching aids, lesson plans and research findings that are relevant to helping struggling readers.