Helping Students With Learning Disabilities

Students individualized education program (IEP) The term IEP is used to refer to the special program or plan that is created with a specific student in mind due to the disability that they have in class which prevents them to learn as fast or with ease as the others in the class.

In this instance, the student has special learning disability and needs to be helped through the IEP in order to get an environment that is conducive for his learning and a team that is assistive as much as possible. The student has difficulty in reading skills and also has difficulty in decoding, comprehension and fluency. These predispose him to be socially removed from peers and there is need to have IEP that would help him in the subjects in class and the social life too.

The seven components of the IEP to be use for the student with special earning disability are; the present level of academic achievement, which will help guide the drafting of the IEP in line with the expected performance levels against the actual achievement. The second component is the annual goals which must be measurable plus the benchmarks or the short-term objectives to these annual goals.

The third aspect is the extent to which the child will not be able to participate with the other students so that the individuals involved in the program know the services needed. The fourth is the services that are necessary to enable the student with the learning disability benefit from education experience. These services may involve speech pathology, counselling, physical and occupational therapy among other services. The fifth aspect is the expected date of commencement of the participation in the IEP.

The sixth aspect is the program testing modification which will help the IEP team decide whether the student needs accommodation in the district testing or any other. The last component is the statement on the length of the duration and how the assessment of the student will be measured. The planning team will be made up of the parents, the physical therapist, the assistant principal of the school, his class teacher, special education resource teacher and a counsellor.

This team will work on an IEP that will be suitable for the students and offer least restrictive environment (LRE). LRE is one of the principles that guide the education of students with disabilities and requires that the students with learning disabilities need to have the chance to learn together with the their non-disabled peers as much as possible and to the extent that is appropriate.

Disability and how to teach the disabled student There are various types of learning disabilities the students experience in school hence need varied approaches in teaching them. The learning disability that is of interest in this case is dyslexia which Davies R.D. (1192) define as difficulty in the student to read and this happens at two levels; the first is at the basic level where the child is unable to relate between sounds, letter and words.

At the second level is when there are problems with reading comprehension and there is difficulty in grasping the meaning of words or phrases or even paragraphs. Some of the signs of dyslexia are the inability to recognize letters and words, the student may also find it difficult to understand words and ideas expressed by a group of words. The student will also manifest difficulty in reading speed and fluency where he will be reading slowly and not fluently.

His general vocabulary skills will be way below that of his peers and generally the student will display high IQ levels in spoken word but falters greatly in the read words. Such a student can be helped in class first by integrating him with the other.