Next week I'm starting a challenging enterprise: I'm going to start teaching a boy who was diagnosed mentally retarded. He had difficulty learning to read in Russian, and, though he has been attending English classes for a year and a half, he can't read in English. Thus, the main task is to teach him reading and some lexis. The boy is 10 y.o.

I'm currently teachig two girls, his peers, who are not successful at school. They are better at reading now, but it takes a lot of time and effort to make them remember words. With them I use the following activities:

1) Making words from letters (on paper and from bricks).

2) Making sentences from individual words.

3) Memory (classical, when you have to remember the position of pairs of words) with words, pictures and letter combinations.

4) Matching words to pictures.

5) Categorising games.

6) The game when they have to remember which words were in a set and list them. 

7) Guessing which word from the set was chosen.

8) Dominoes and lottos.