Case+Study+Critique

= Picture Writers: Journey Through the Writing Process with Eric Carle =

**1. The Context**
====Marilyn is a 3rd grade teacher. She is planning a language arts mini-unit with Juanita Long who is the reading specialist. This Unit is supposed to enhance what the students have learned before in a science unit on animals and habitats.====

**2. The types of disabilities/exceptionalities encountered**
====Oscar is a student the teacher has to pay special attention to. He has severe learning needs. He is not able to properly read print because of his visual impairment. That is why he often requires the help of a transcriber. The question that arises for Marilyn is, how she can support Oscar´s needs and at the same time connect with tactile learners.====

**3. Modifications, Accomodations, and/or Strategies used to address disability/exeptionality**
====What the teacher did in cooperation with the reading specialist was set up a unit of various lessons. Generally she used diverse methods to create an interesting unit, that was appealing to all students. It was the goal that all students create their own collage picture book and an iMovie presentation of them. Here is an [|example] of how such an iMovie presentation could look like.====

She used books of the author Eric Carle to give the students an example of how to create their collage book.
====The teaching methodology changed throughout the lessons and included guided reading, direct instruction, and teacher guided small group instructions. Juanita also used tiered assignments with the teacher guided small group lessons that would be embedded as part of the guided reading.==== ====The reading specialist Juanita guided Oscar through the entire process one-on-one, but at the same time 4 other students formed a group with Oscar in a team-teaching approach, so they could also benefit from Oscars´ way of learning. It was the team-teaching approach that benefited everyone. ====

**4. The technologies used**
====Marilyn used a lot of technology for her unit. The students watched a movie called ´Eric Carle: Picture Writer´ in order to explore his artistic approach to painting the pages that are used for his collage illustrations. While watching the movie they used a graphic organizer and made guided notes. The students were also supposed to create their own Webquest after discussing Eric Carles´ website.====

The technology that was especially used for Oscar was a speech synthesis software that could process text-to-speech. This would liberate him as a learner and reader of the Eric Carle books.
====In this example we can see that the students were exposed to multiple means of representation, since they were watching a movie, explored a website and read books of Eric Carle. The students also had many ways to engage during the lessons, be it in team working or in individual reading sessions. The students also had many ways to express what they have learned. They created not only an iMovie project, but also a collage picture book and a group reflection lesson, where students could also voice their opinion and give feedback. ====