road less traveled, The

Kappa Delta Pi Record, Summer 2001 by Pauwels, Pamela, Hess, Carol

Teaching reading to special-needs children took a new direction as a teacher implemented a "word wall," using brain-based learning and constructivist concepts.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

-Robert Frost (1916)

Taylor, a first grader, is standing on a chair pointing to the school menu on the wall. "Today we are having... What are we having?" she whispered in my ear. "Oh yeah," she said as she pointed to the menu, "chicken nuggets, pears, and peas ... peas, like Eat Your Peas Louise! [Snow 1991]. I know that word!" It was on that day that I knew that my K-1 special education resource room was making a difference-in my student's lives and in my life as a teacher. My students were making connections!

It is the brain's job to learn; it has a virtually inexhaustible capacity to learn. It looks for patterns, connections, and meaning. Children know when they have learned something that makes sense (Came and Caine 1994). When Taylor read the word peas, a connection was made with that word to the big book that we had spent a week reading and rewriting. For the past eight years, I have been teaching special-needs children. As a preservice teacher, I was taught the traditional methods for teaching children with special needs. These methods focused on overlearning, which was thought to be the secret for ensuring the automaticity of the language and reading processes (Bannatyne 1971). Many of the teaching strategies included repetition and overpractice of isolated skills-all of the things that seemed to zap the love of learning from my students.

One fateful day, my school district sent me to a two-day workshop, "How Our Brain Works: How to Make It Work Better," presented by Robert Sylwester. He spoke primarily about his book, Celebration of Neurons: An Educator's Guide to the Human Brain (1995), which opened a door to information I had been searching for. Listening to Sylwester speak about what new technology has revealed about the brain and contemplating what that meant for me as a teacher led me to constructivism, the theory of making meaningful connections through engaged learning.

With this new information, added to my own knowledge of the literature-based (Routman 1988) and whole-part-whole (Strickland 1998) methods of teaching reading, I couldn't wait to implement the concepts that I had learned in my classroom. During the past year on my road less traveled, I saw revolutionary changes in my students: a renewed excitement for learning and academic strides that I had not seen in my previous years of teaching. This article examines the road I traveled-brain-based learning, constructivist theory of learning, literature-based strategies to teach reading-leading to student and teacher empowerment.

That year, I had a group of four first-grade girls in my resource room. They were all in a pull-out program, and each spent one to two hours a day in my room. Taylor was a vivacious, tiny blonde with a booming voice. She just could not sit still and was constantly falling off her chair. Courtney, on the other hand, was gentle, sweet, and soft-spoken. She had been missing her two front teeth for what seemed to be forever, or at least for as long as I had known her. She was a bright little girl who loved to please. Dakota was the spitfire in the group! She was very social and talkative... a little character. She made us all laugh! She could also be quite obstinate, which added an interesting dynamic to the group. Finally, there was Katy. Katy was usually the quiet one in my room. Most of the time, she would sit quietly, watching and listening to the others. She didn't like to answer but would sit with a big smile on her face, enjoying our little group and our big book activities. She was my silent learner and went on to make great strides that school year. All four girls started that fall knowing the majority of the letter names and sounds. The next big step was to learn about beginning sounds and high-frequency sight words.

Literature-Based Reading Strategies

During the first week of school, I read an article (Wagstaff 1998) about a kindergarten teacher that used an ABC word wall in her classroom to teach letter names and beginning sounds. What grabbed my attention about the word wall was that it made letters and words come alive by connecting them to big books read in class. This was a missing link in my instruction of special-needs children: a connection to authentic literature. I was so impressed with the author's results that I put up my own word wall the very next day!

Prior to the word wall, I had been doing shared-reading and repeated-reading techniques with my students. I read a big book aloud while the students echoed me. We reread the same big book aloud daily for one week (Farstrup and Samuels 1992). What I added was teaching beginning sounds and sight words using the big book and the word wall, which began as an ABC word wall displaying the capital and lowercase letters.