As more and more special education and learning disabled students become mainstreamed into our classrooms, New Haven teachers have to modify their lessons to the new range of skills in their classrooms. One possible modification to the literature portions of this unit it to rely less the lengthier novels suggested and more on short stories or picture books.
Some students can’t read as well as others, and some are what is known as visual learners. This modified approach allows all students in the class to appreciate the material. A diversified approach also provides the on-level reader or non-disabled student a new, different, and enriched perspective on the subject. Images can be, and often are, more powerful than the pen.
One excellent literature selection to achieve this goal is the powerful picture book
Bound for America: The Forced Migration of Africans to the New World
. In it, the author explains the history of slavery in Europe and Africa, plus the growth and decline of the New World slave trade, with a storyline that is based on contemporary accounts and full-color and black-and-white drawings from a variety of sources. These emotional images can convey to a special needs student the agonizing experience that slavery was.
A suggestion for an assignment would be to have the student draw their own image of the slave experience based on the story line. Or the opposite. The student can write the story of one of the characters from the many images in the book. Both assignments force to the student to “be the slave” for a moment and capture the emotions of the slave. In the end, this modified approach can also be used as a form of assessment for the student. Other similar assignments can be used with any modified materials.
