Areas to focus on and suggested strategies

Reading:

• Work on decoding and fluency first before comprehension - help Samantha recognize when she leaves off endings and reverses words, so that she builds in a self-monitoring system.
• Provide Samantha with decoding and cueing strategies.
• As her fluency increases begin to build in comprehension strategies, especially for dealing with textbooks.

Expressive Writing:

• Build on Samantha's strengths of organizing material and using beginning and closing sentences.
• Teach her the writing process with a focus on editing and sentence structure (grammar and capitalization) - could use COPS for editing.
• Create a personal resource book that identifies common errors so she can monitor these errors.
• Samantha relies completely on phonetics when spelling - integrate word groups and structure of words, spelling rules, and incorporate word searches and games to help her visualize the words.

Math:

• Focus on strategies that help Samantha with multi-step calculations.
• Investigate different strategies together for completing algorithms that involve more than two digits.
• Develop steps and use a mnemonic technique to help her find information on graphs.