Readtopia is Live!
By Don Johnston
It has been a long time coming, and a work of deep passion for students with autism and complex needs. When you see it, you will see this passion, and it will become apparent that this is something special in our work to transform education for individuals with disabilities.
What is Readtopia? It’s a comprehensive reading, ELA, social studies, and science curriculum for middle and high school special education classrooms.
What’s different? Readtopia helps teachers bring first-hand experiential learning into the classroom, so students can bridge the gap between learning through reading, and learning through experiencing.
This is a different level of instruction. It’s the type of instruction you would have wanted when you were in school. It takes the learner around the world to truly experience
what they learn. It brings together video, authentic literature, graphic novels (at six levels), leveled informational text (10 text types), phonics, and assessment to build core reading skills while teaching standards-based content.
Karen Erickson and Caroline Musselwhite were both deeply involved in the instructional design and materials. We had world travelers, a Discovery Channel videographer, a history PhD, SLPs, writers, practitioners, and half a dozen districts actively partnered with us to implement materials during development.
Words cannot do justice to what was done here. To really understand, check out our webpage and watch the short video we put together from the classroom:
