Finding adapted books for special education
While teaching beginning literacy skills to my high school aged students I found I had an issue that I ran into again and again. The levelled readers or adapted books I used just weren’t capturing their attention. These high school special education students were 12-19 years old reading books targeted at 4-6 year old children and hated it. The published levelled readers available to teach beginning readers were about topics my students just weren’t interested in (e.g. Dress Ups featuring 4 year old children). In addition, these teens struggling to learn emergent literacy skills had been reading these same level 1 books their whole schooling life. They were bored and resisted reading the same books over and over, which is completely understandable.
I continued my search online to find something suitable but everything I found used designs and clipart that were clearly targeted towards early years students. I was never able to find high quality adapted books that would get my students attention, cater to their interests, and provide variety to my reading interventions. There were few adapted books I found acceptable but even then, I still found I had a lot to do to make use of these books, especially when it came to providing worksheets and activities to further support literacy development.
What I wanted was a set of emergent readers or adapted books suitable for leaners of all ages. The adapted books needed to be high quality, so my students felt they were reading proper books. The books also needed to come with supplementary emergent reader activities to support the development of emergent literacy skills. Finally, they needed to make planning reading intervention simple and easy for teachers and support staff.
Try searching for that in google, not an easy task.
Creating adapted books for special education
Rather than just complain to my colleagues whilst drinking my morning coffee and adding random words to my google searches hoping it would make a difference, I decided to instead put the time into making them myself.
After pumping myself up and getting excited about what I was about to create I set out to create my series of special education adapted books that would snatch the attention of my students. What they were going to be was what I said I’ve always wanted, high quality emergent readers on topics that will interest emergent literacy learners of all ages (especially teenagers!!!) and they will have the accompanying emergent reader activities to support the book during any reading intervention.
So, Did I do it? Well I’m very happy to say after many more early morning coffee’s and perhaps a little less google searching I’ve achieved my goal. I have created ten adapted books targeted at the early emergent reader level and accompanying lesson plans (to guide a reading intervention lesson).
What’s in these accompanying lesson plans? Well let me tell you, there’s question prompts using Blanks levels of questioning to assess student comprehension. There are worksheets that involve colouring (spelt coloring for my North American friends 😉), puzzles and matching activities. Each adapted book has a writing booklet to practice writing skills. I’ve even added two file folder activities, aimed to develop emergent reader skills after they’ve read through the adapted book. This is because when I do 1:1 reading intervention, I not only want to guide them through identifying words and develop concepts of print skills, I want to follow up with activities related to the book they have read.
These books are something I’ve always needed in my classroom and I’m so happy with how they’ve turned out. They‘ve made teaching reading in my special education classroom so easy. Even my untrained support staff have been able to pick up the lesson plan and run the reading intervention effectively. Now I just have to make more!
Features of my adapted books for special education
I’ve created my adapted books with some key features that make them appropriate to all year levels.
Real life photos
When creating the adapted books I kept in mind that, as I’m sure many of you have experienced, capturing the attention of high schoolers is not always easy. Sometimes it feels like they have extremely limited attention span, that and they are just too cool for everything! To help capture their attention and maintain it, I made the decision to use real photo’s in my adapted books. This is so students can better relate the content to their own real life experiences. There is also a diverse representation of people to try and ensure teenagers from a range of different cultures and backgrounds can relate to the content in the books. I hope to promote a feeling in my students that they are being respected. A great article on using making students feel respected can be found here but the short version is students want to feel respected and learn better when they are. Giving a teenager an activity that feels like it was designed for a five year old is not giving them respect and it may even harm the relationship you have with that student.
Themes
I have written my adapted books on five different themes; Interests & Activities, People, Nature, Places and Events. These different themes are colour coded throughout the series and provides a diverse choice in finding an adapted book that each student could be interested in. For example, John might be interest in the jungle so he might particularly like the Nature adapted books however; Kelly enjoys parties so the Events adapted books may capture her interest more. Connecting activities to a students interests increases their engagement. If you would like some more information on this check out this, there is a very relevant article here.
Differentiated options
Each book I created comes as both a standard emergent reading book (with simple sentences) and an adapted book version for students not yet reading words or who are non-verbal to engage with the texts by matching words in the sentence. This not only develops concepts of print including text directionality but also gives students a sense of satisfaction and success with their reading. There are also various differentiated options throughout the supplementary emergent reader activities including different levels of worksheets (e.g. tracing words, independently writing words, independently writing sentences).
Using the adapted books for special education during a reading intervention
I have created these emergent reader books and put in the hard work so you don’t have to, right down to the lesson plan. Each adapted book comes with an Emergent Reader Intervention Guide, which outlines a simple 1:1 reading intervention lesson that can be done by any supporting adult, including parents or untrained support staff. The intervention guide follows these basic steps and strategies for developing emergent literacy skills:
- Discussion prior to reading book (look at the front cover and discuss the title and topic. Talk about previous experiences with topic e.g. “have you ever been to the beach before”)
- Guided reading of book (e.g. model pointing to words left to right and one at a time, say words for student to repeat, match words if using the adapted book version)
- Questioning to facilitate and gauge comprehension during reading of the book (question prompts provided offering suggestions of questions for each page of the book using Blanks 4 levels of questioning)
- Suggestions of tasks or discussion points for after reading the book (e.g. model retelling book, review vocabulary, relate story to own life). Two file folder activities (Vocabulary Match and Sight Word Practice) provided to develop topic vocabulary and sight words from the adapted book.
- Additional activities provided to further develop vocabulary and emergent literacy skills (vocabulary writing, emergent reader writing booklet, wordsearch, puzzle)
The best thing about it, is everything is included in the digital download of the book, including the lesson plan, differentiated books and supplementary emergent reader activities, so students are provided a wholesome emergent literacy intervention with very little work preparation required.
Where CAn You FInd My Adapted Books?
my adapted books can be found by navigating through my teachers pay teachers shop that can be accessed from the menu bar or directly from this link
Feedback on my adapted books for special education
As I’m sure you can tell, I’m incredibly happy with these adapted books that I have created. They have worked well for the students and schools my colleagues and I have used them in but we all know the most amazing and yet difficult thing about special education is that no two classrooms are the same. So, I’m very open to feedback on these emergent reader books and activities, so I can continually make them the most effective they can be. If you have suggestions or ideas for more adapted books you would like me to create, I would love to hear from you. Comment below or come and find me on Instagram.
If like me you love these books or want to save this article for later, remember to save the pin below.
Happy Teaching
Jess