Teaching Strategies for the Three Learning Disability Clusters

Strategies for Learners with a Visual Processing Learning Disability

• Use a sound or phonics-based reading program.
• Teach irregular sound combinations like “tion” and “ing”.
• Teach vowel rules. For example: “when two vowels go out walking, the first one does the talking”.
• Use short poems. The rhyme and rhythm in poems help in predicting sounds and words.
• Teach skimming skills. This helps learners to get the “gist” of what a piece of text is about.
• Teach scanning skills. This helps learners to look for where important information in the text can usually be found.
• Give learners cloze exercises (leave every #th word blank) to help with prediction and break word by word reading patterns.
• Don’t have learners read aloud if it makes them feel uncomfortable.
• Teach pre-reading skills to show learners what to look for when reading.
• Teach meta-cognitive skills (awareness of one’s own thinking) to help learners interact with text and to make it personal and meaningful.
• Teach word families with emphasis on sounds.
• Use spelling tricks.
• Use sounds to remember words for spelling. For example: “Scissor” – “s(k)issor”
• Use word sentences to help memory (mnemonics). For example: “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge” for the lines in written music.