Why adapted books are essential for all special education classrooms.

Reading and comprehension are as important for our special needs students as they are for mainstream students. So how do we teach our special needs students this skill? This is why I use adapted books. Adapted books are books that have been modified in some way to make them easier for special needs students to read and to understand comprehension.

I use 3 levels of each book because more and more special education classrooms are having various levelled students in one class and we are expected to differentiate for all of our students. If your students are like my students, then they don't like reading different books to other students, they feel they should be reading the same books and I agree! So to make this work I have each of the books with 3 levels so that my whole class can read the same book but at their specific level. They are happy because regardless of the levels all students feel they are reading the same book and are therefore not 'missing' out because they are not at the level of other students.

Students love adapted books, they are interactive and engaging, they certainly make reading a lot more exciting! They also target language skills, sentence structures and comprehension. Level 1 consists of pictures of keywords no sentence in book just blank spots where they need to put it and no more than 2 per page, level 2 consists of sentences in book with blanks where the students need to work out where in the sentence the picture and keywords need to go usually consists of 2 or more per page and level 3 consists of only text of keywords no picture and sentences in book. As the books become more challenging students rely less on picture identification and more on the text.

Level 1;
This level 1 book on colours and numbers consists of text in the book with pictures as well as the 2 keywords they are working on for this butterfly book (numbers and colours). The students have to match the correct colour of the butterfly and amount butterflies on the page to create a sentence on each page. All pictures are paired with words, this is designed for lower functioning students who do find this challenging.

Level 2;
This level 2 book on people in our community consists of text in the book but no pictures, however, the 2 or more keywords they are working on has pictures with words. The students still have to match the correct people in our community and the workplaces that they work at as well as understanding the text in the book. This is the level between the pictures with words book and no pictures with words book.

Level 3;
This level 3 book on shapes, colours and numbers consists of only text in the book and keywords. The students have to read and understand the sentence and match the words for each page to create the sentence. Students need to identify how many shapes are on each page, what colour and what type of shape to create the sentence for each page.

All 3 of these books are available in all 3 levels with the adaptations for each level. I find them very successful, especially when used with Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) such as PODD, Proloquo2go, TouchChat and other devices. Especially when these books work on keywords, sight-words and core-words much the same way as our AAC devices do too.