Abstract
California’s adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects (California Department of Education, 2013) requires all students, including students with disabilities, to be college and career ready by the end of the twelfth grade. Yet, the resources and guidelines that are emerging to support educators in implementing literacy instruction for students with disabilities are mostly applicable to students with learning disabilities (Haager & Vaughn, 2013; Knight, Browder, Agnello, & Lee, 2010). In order to ensure that students with moderate to severe disabilities are also provided meaningful access to core curriculum instruction that aligns with CCSS, resources for this specific population of students also need to be developed to support educators in planning and implementing effective literacy programs. The purpose of this project was to create a curriculum guide for educators to assist them in developing and implementing instruction for students with moderate to severe disabilities, grades 4th-6th, that aligns with CCSS. The curriculum guide provides three case student scenarios, one for each grade 4th -6th, and specific examples of accommodations and modifications that can support each of these students in accessing core curriculum literacy activities as well as examples of systematic instruction to teach these students specific literacy skills. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is utilized as a framework throughout the guide to further ensure the case example student access to and participation in literacy activities. The curriculum used for adaptation is Core Ready Lesson Sets; Grades 3-5, Journey to Meaning: Comprehension and Critique (Allyn, 2014) for 4th and 5th grade and Grade 6 English Language Arts Curriculum (EngageNY, 2014) for 6th grade. Writing with Symbols 2000 and Boardmaker software (Mayer- Johnson, n.d.) was used to adapt literacy activities for students who required extra support by creating picture icon to accompany words in the text. There is one lesson plan for each Common Core English language arts curriculum area (i.e., Reading for Literature, Reading for Informational Text, and Writing) per grade level for a total of nine lessons in the guide. The guide also provides additional resource and strategies to support students with moderate to severe disabilities to gain literacy skills in the areas of vocabulary/word recognition, reading comprehension and writing. This guide is not designed to be used as a stand-alone curriculum unit. The hope is that special educators can use the example strategies, accommodations and modifications in the sample lessons as a guide to modify and adapt English language arts curriculum to meet the needs of their students with moderate to severe disabilities within their own programs. In the future, the guide should be field tested with a group of special educators in order to determine the effectiveness of the guide in assisting them to provide access to the core literacy curriculum to range of students with a variety of ages as well as abilities.