Adequate Access, One Page At A Time: Using Novel Studies to Access General Education Curricula Across all Academic Domains

This presentation will outline use of multisensory teaching strategies to provide meaningful access to the general education curriculum for secondary students with multiple disabilities The use of multisensory teaching techniques and strategies facilitate learning by engaging students on multiple levels. Using multisensory teaching strategies, the presenter has novel studies that correlate with the general education curriculum. By using adapted novels and multiple means of representation, students are able to learn about age-appropriate literature while accommodating for different developmental levels. The participants in this presentation will learn how the presenter has used literature to guide classroom curriculum sequence. Social Studies, Science, and Mathematic lessons relate directly to key elements from the literature/novel passage that the students are reading that week. The selection process used for choosing the unit literature involves passing a teacher made rubric. The literature has to provide opportunities for each academic domain to be accessed. The classroom teacher used cross curriculum planning to include components of Social Studies, Science, and Mathematics. All four sensory modalities (auditory, visual, tactile, and kinesthetic) are included in the unit development. A simple read aloud or a point and follow activity are not sufficient for this population. This classroom includes students with cortical visual impairment, total blindness, conductive hearing loss, and sensorineural hearing loss. However, the impairments do not hinder teaching and learning or inclusion in general curriculum