Teaching Literacy to Students with Complex Access Needs

The purpose of this training is to give teachers of students with significant cognitive disabilities the information and tools needed to provide meaningful literacy instruction and experiences.

The needs of students with a significant cognitive disability require specialized adaptations and modifications to traditional literacy strategies. This training series will explore many different strategies to teach a wide variety of literacy skills.

The chapters in this training series will focus on reading and writing skills, along with literature activities for students with significant cognitive disabilities.

The chapters and supporting resources serve as on-going support for teachers of students with significant cognitive disabilities. Teachers for this student population may be one of the only teachers on campus with the specialized skills to support this population of students.

The learning objectives for this training are:

• Introduce processes of literacy and their relationship to students with significant cognitive disabilities.
• Help professionals recognize literacy skills and written language development in students with significant cognitive disabilities.
• Describe a range of intervention strategies that address pre-early emerging to early conventional literacy needs of students with significant cognitive disabilities.