On occasion, grade schools can sometimes make it difficult for children to feel included in their school's community because they have learning disabilities. Is the best way to help students along with common core standards to exclude them from their classrooms and keep them away from their peers? While all schools are diverse in the types of students they accommodate, I believe that inclusion in the classroom is the best way to increase a student's self-esteem and help to further motivate each child to succeed.
Books That Grow is a company that is revolutionizing the way students learn around the nation. By producing stories such as, "Martin Luther King, Jr.: Fearless Justice," written by Greg Kirmser, in not one, not two, but at least four different reading levels, students with learning disabilities can be included in the same classroom setting as anyone else! How's that for beating common core standards, huh? Personally, I think this is a brilliant idea. There is an entire library of books on the Books That Grow App that teachers can use to assign to their students. One thing that is really awesome about BTG is that the students can decide to read their assigned book at whichever reading level they are most comfortable with. However, the teacher can set a minimum reading level that her students must read at.
This innovative technology helps students learn in their Proximal Zone of Development. Psychologist, Lev Vygostky, idealized the PZD in a study of childhood language acquisition. He states that the PZD is the area in which children can learn without the information going over their heads. Therefore, a teacher would push the student to the farthest point of his or her ZPD without ever crossing the line further beyond that point. In doing so, the child is then able to learn within his or her own pace without feeling frustrated about not being able to understand the material. Once the child has learned enough information to reach a certain point in his or her ZPD, the farthest boundary of the ZPD extends to allow the child to learn even more. With BTG's digital novels, written at different levels, students can reach the farthest boundary of their own ZPD and push that boundary farther and farther while continuing to learn and grow but never go beyond what they can achieve in that moment until they are able to do so.
A more inclusive classroom leads to an overall better learning experience for the students. Students of all learning levels can feel confident that they are doing well in school and understanding the material along with their classmates. It also helps teachers and schools to take pride in their attempts to work with diverse students to make learning more fun, easier as well as beneficial. This is why Books That Grow is an amazing new technology perfect for every single classroom in the United States.
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