Written Language

This is a major area of need. Students struggle to express in writing what they have learned. This complicated and integrative task requires a highly structured step by step instructional process. This includes brainstorming a topic, producing a rough draft, just getting ideas down on paper, reviewing and editing the first draft, making changes to produce the final or best copy. Developing writing at the sentence to paragraph level in a structured manner is stressed. Staff provide sentence and paragraph models and use consistent, prescribed templates or formats to support this comprehensive skill. Step by step guidance is required until students have internalized the steps and can generate written language with greater independence.

In addition to addressing the students' language skills, math content focuses on developing basic computational skills and the application of these skills to daily needs. Students follow prescribed step by step processes to problem solve and are asked to explain verbally and in written form how they arrived at a solution. These skills are a challenge to the students' abstract thinking and reasoning ability and demand daily drill and reinforcement.