Read and Write Gold referral at Macklin P.S.

Read and Write Gold Referral at Macklin P.S.

The SEA department offers special education teachers the opportunity to co-plan and co-teach a lesson with an Itinerant Teacher in Assistive Technology. Sahaira Khan, from Macklin P.S., did just that with her grade 6 students. She planned a lesson with an Itinerant Teacher using the theme of empathy as a follow up to a wonderful Remembrance Day assembly. Read and Write Gold was used to support her students during both a reading and a writing task.

During the first session her students read a poem written by a soldier, entitled “Wheelchair Soldier.” They used the playfeature of RWG to help support their reading and understanding of the poem, and the highlighterand predictiontools to help support the answering of questions.

The second session had students writing “Letters to The Troops.” First as a group, the students brainstormed ideas for the letter - Tell about yourself (paragrah 1), Ask questions (paragraph 2), Well wish (paragraph 3). 

Student Brainstorm for their “Letter to the Troops”

They then used the predictionand dictionaryfeatures of Read and Write Gold to write a letter to a soldier, and the spell checkand read backfeature to edit their work. 
Students hard at working creating their letter using Read and Write Gold (left); Observing teacher looks on as a student uses the Word Prediction feature to help compose his letter (right)

Their teacher, along with the observing teachers, commented on how engaged and independent the students were. Some said that this is the most the students have ever written before. The students themselves were very proud of their accomplishments.

In their own words…

“Thank you for helping us using Read and Write Gold. I like to use Read and Write Gold because when there is important information I can use the highlighters to underline the important information. And there is a play and pause button to read the information that I have wrote on the computer. The word prediction was useful because I can’t spell words all the time.” ~ ‘K’ a grade 6 student

“Thank you for helping me improve my skills on read and write gold. I think it will really be useful to me when I have a project because it reads the text to you and if you have a mistake you can find out what it is because sometimes you can make mistakes even when you read the text over. I also like the highlighters because when you are highlighting you can highlight the important and valuable information. It is a really good process and it will help me sometime soon when I get an assignment.” ~ ‘S’ a grade 6 student