At Nativity School in El Monte, adapting teaching methods to accommodate students with different learning styles has become a way of life.

"Students are moved [around to different classrooms] so that they're challenged no matter if they're accelerated or if they're remedial," says Sister of St. Louis Stacy Reineman, Nativity principal. For example, gifted math students may attend higher grade level classes while struggling students do remedial math work in lower grade classes.

Adapting curriculum to students' proficiency levels has resulted in the novel situation of some students learning high-level algebra and others appreciably raising their standardized math test scores. And, Sister Reineman quips, students with "slacker" tendencies not working up to their potential are motivated to master skills quickly.

For two years now, Sister Reineman has assigned veteran teacher Sister of St. Louis Marilee Davis, 74, to work with small groups as well as one-on-one with students lagging behind in language arts. Sister Davis, a 50-year educator who taught fifth grade at Nativity for 25 years, says the joys of her students' accomplishments "far outweighs the work."

Currently, she tutors two boys, a fifth grader and fourth grader, every morning in a trailer on the school playground. The students take turns reading while Sister Davis prints difficult vocabulary words on cards and the blackboard. Both boys have raised their reading scores, and the fourth grader is mastering his multiplication tables with Sister Davis' patient assistance.

The one-on-one daily tutoring is something that isn't available in public school, since special tutoring is limited to a couple of days a week. The intensive morning tutoring also allows the boys to stay in their respective classes.

Sister Davis is enthusiastic about this phase of her teaching career and has taken seminars on tutoring special needs students. All Nativity staff members are attending the second annual inclusion conference March 10 at LMU, where workshops on helping students with learning disabilities will be offered.

"The parents are so grateful [their children] are getting help," said Sister Davis. She's looking forward to input from Cal State Los Angeles speech and language professors currently working on campus in a program helping children with learning and speech disabilities which started in January.

"The Weingart Foundation gave me a $10,000 grant to start this pilot program and it's the first program that anyone knows about where there's a university working with an elementary school in this way," said Sister Reineman. Twice a week, a Cal State LA professor and two speech and language interns work individually with four students. After the first eight week session, another group of students will be referred for the in-school educational therapy.

"I think it's going really well. I think that we have been very well accepted here by the community of teachers," said Joan Tancredi, Cal State LA speech and language grad student supervisor. "We're trying to [help] the students in their primary language skills."

For some, this means improving speech articulation. Others need help in reading comprehension or understanding abstract vocabulary.

During an individual tutoring session, the graduate student clinician writes difficult vocabulary words on cards while the student looks up word meanings in the dictionary. Understanding words is a big step toward deciphering main ideas in reading texts.

According to grad student speech clinician Norma Flores Lovett, one of her students is achieving 70 percent of main idea recognition just since tutoring began in January. "If students' problems can be identified at an early age, you can remediate the problem with less difficulty," said Flores Lovett.