Books for Struggling Readers

One of my most important goals as a special education English teacher in a middle school is to teach my students to love reading and help them become life long readers. However, this can be very challenging when students are coming into sixth grade three or four years below grade level in reading. I’m lucky to have a supportive administration who provides us with books for our classroom, however I have found that my students with special needs realize their full potential through reading very specific types of books called “low level, high interest” books. Being a child in 6-8 grade on an elementary school reading level often means being limited to books that the students are unmotivated and often embarrassed to read. Last year, I bought a box of ten of these low level, high interest books and was amazed by how engaged, even my lowest/ most reluctant readers, were in the stories! This year, I would love to be able to offer a whole library of low level, high interest books to not only incoming my sixth graders, but my students from last year and my eighth grade advisory students.