Readtopia: New Special Needs Reading Curriculum Coming

We’ve been watching with growing excitement a new reading curriculum for middle to high school students with special needs called Readtopia.

Combining documentary videos, texts, literature, graphic novels and direct instruction on decoding and comprehension Readtopia develops core literacy and communication skills with relevant curriculum material. Readtopia is a collection of Thematic Units that combine both core narrative text often adapted from well-known literary sources and curricular text and other content. Over a dozen Thematic Units have are detailed including:

• World War 2 with The Story of Anne Frank as the narrative literary text;
• Ancient Egypt with Cleopatra as the narrative text
• Geology / Dinosaurs with Journey to the Center of the Earth as the narrative text

The texts are considerately written and levelled. But information is presented in engaging and real formats including graphs, maps, charts, timelines, bibliographies and more.

The videos particularly captured our imagination. They look spectacular and really take the student right into some breath-taking locations and even moments of history. Developing background knowledge is so important to fruitful reading experiences and the Readtopia videos are key to that.

Readtopia has some very familiar names in the credits. It was developed by some of the most respected thought leaders, researchers and curriculum developers in our field, including:

• Karen Erickson,
• Caroline Musselwhite,
• Jerry Stemach,
• and, of course, Don Johnston.

We’re waiting on pricing, release dates and more information.

But you can get a good sense of what’s coming by checking out the comprehensive web page with a video introduction. Sign-up on the page to get a notification as soon as Readtopia becomes available. Stay tuned!