A difficult task

           Before I describe one difficult subject I have to teach, I would like to describe my class. I teach the life skills class with less than 10 students. The students all have developmental disabilities ranging from intellectual developmental disability (IDD) previously known as (Mental Retardation/MR) and Autism. My students abilities range from reading on a DRA level 1, to reading sight words to barely speaking. But in my classroom the students are always learning. It may be something as small as pointing to a picture of the class and saying Mrs. Davis. These moments are what I live for. However, because I expect so much of my students, I push them to learn above and beyond their disabilities.
         The most difficult subject for me to teach is reading. It is difficult to read a book to the entire class because some of the children do not stay focused for that long (which I know happens in every class no matter what you teach). Because of this it is hard to ask comprehension questions and have the students really understand what is going on in the story. Also when I am working with a student individually teaching them to read small sentences, I am not 100% sure they understand the sentence they just read has a literal meaning. For example, I have used this lesson to have my students connect the words to reality: "This is a chair", and then I will have the students touch a chair. This is a great start for most of my students and I am happy to get to this point but of course I want to expand it and see if they can read and understand more.
       These are some ideas I've come up with from the help of my interact team and other teachers. I can use dramatic play to teach reading comprehension. I also thought that I could make a movie of the students acting a story using movie maker or animoto then play it for them.  The students will see themselves acting out a story and then we can ask questions about the characters, setting, plot, etc. I've also thought of having my students listen to books on tape instead of listening to me read. Perhaps they will like the recording better.
        I would also like to incorporate ipads into my classroom. I have seen that students with disabilities can use the ipads to read, by first reading on paper "here is a" and then the ipad will display a picture of something perhaps a bird, so that the student says "here is a bird" and relates that sentence to an actual picture of a bird.
        I am very excited to try these ideas and am confident that it if nothing else it will allow my students to show creativity and gain confidence in seeing videos of themselves at school.