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Tips for a Successful Monday
If you are anything like me, you hate Mondays. After having a relaxing weekend filled with family and friends, you have to get up early again and start a new week. Here are a few tips to help you get your week started right, and have a successful Monday. Prepare on Friday When you leave on Friday, do not leave yourself heaping piles of paperwork and a messy desk. Before you leave, do your weekly cleaning. Before I leave for the day on Friday I make sure my room is ready for the following week. I start by cleaning all of my desks. It is cold season and with a…
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Special Education Organization Essentials
Organization is one of my biggest challenges as a special education teacher. Between work samples, reports, IEPs, modifying their work, study guides, graphic organizers, and checklists; I feel like I am constantly drowning in paperwork! Every year I find a new way to organize myself that I think is going to be the trick to keeping myself organized. But, every year something does not work the way I expect it to, or there is something that I just do not keep up with. After a lot of trial and error, here are the best products I have found for organizing my classroom. Bankers Box Eight Compartment Literature Sorter I love these…
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Leveled Novels on the Holocaust for Middle School Students
Each year, the ELA teacher that I co-teach with and I teach a unit on the Holocaust. This is an amazing unit that she developed long before working with me and I am just fortunate to be a part of it. This unit includes teaching them background knowledge. They explore situations where they have to decide what they would do. And, they read a book on the Holocaust and participate in book club discussions. One of the many reasons that I love this unit is because of the multitude of books there are to choose from. We can carefully select groups of students and assign them to a book that…
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The Pros & Cons of Teacher Proximity
Using your presence can be a powerful tool in the classroom. It makes you more accessible, helps with classroom management, and it can be subtle. But, is teacher proximity always a good thing? Teacher Proximity: What is it? One popular technique for classroom management is using your person to influence what is happening in the classroom, or teacher proximity. Standing close to students or standing strategically in a certain area of the classroom can affect the students and the mood of the classroom in different ways. Pro: Chatty Students If you have a group of students that is always chatty when they think you are not looking, this is a…
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The Beginners Guide to Inclusion
I recently took a course on inclusion practices. Although I am a special education teacher who is very familiar with the inclusion setting, I am always looking for new tips, techniques, or practices to bring into my classrooms and to better help my students. History and Introduction Inclusion is the practice of including special education students in the general education setting. In the past, students with disabilities were often removed from the classroom. They did this to provide them with support and instruction that was focused on their abilities and needs. But, removing students with disabilities from the classroom can cause them to get even further behind, and it also…
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6 Strategies to support students with ASD in an Inclusion classroom
6 Strategies for students with ASD in an inclusion setting.
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Parent Communication: 5 Things to Remember
One of the biggest parts of our job, and sometimes one of the most difficult parts of our job, is talking to parents. Parent communication can be stressful. Usually, when parents contact us, it is not for something positive. They usually contact us when they are upset or confused about something. We must maintain a strong home/school relationships because this will significantly benefit the student. It is important that, to the best of our abilities, home and school are on the same page. When you’re dealing with parents, try some of the following tips: They just want to be heard Sometimes parents, or people in general, often just need to…
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4 Awesome Middle School Reading Resources
Most school districts that I am familiar with, do not have a reading curriculum to use with inclusion students in middle school that receiving pull out reading services. At my school, there is a sub-separate curriculum for reading but this does not address the specific needs of my students because they are not far enough below grade level to qualify. When I started working at my school, we did have a reading curriculum, although, no one was using it because it was stale, outdated, and the kids hated it! Because of this, I have had to find my own tools and resources to use to teach my pull out of…
