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Accommodations for Students who Struggle with Reading Comprehension
What some teachers I work with don’t realize is that students who have deficits in reading comprehension are affected in all of their classes, not just ELA. Most classes, especially as you get into middle school and high school, require you to do independent reading of some kind. Often reading out of a text book in social studies or science, reading novels in ELA, and even comprehending word problems in math. Here are some tips that you can use to help support your students: Read Aloud Whether you read the passage or text out loud to them yourself, find an audio book, or use text to speech software; students who…
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Tips for Co-Teaching Online
I am currently prepping for next year, and like the rest of you, I have no idea if I’m prepping for face to face teaching, or online teaching… or both. Because of this I am really starting to stress about how I am going to do my job. It has been made clear to us that we are still expected to meet every accommodation and service delivery minute of our students’ IEPs. I get why they’re setting that expectation, but how do I deliver the amount of inclusion minutes when I am not together with the other teachers and a lot of the other teachers aren’t doing live classes? I…
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Tips for Difficult Behaviors
Working in an inclusion setting leads to many different challenges. You are trying to manage many different learning styles, abilities, and often you are trying to juggle some behaviors as well. I think juggling really is the best description for what I do on a daily basis! I put together some of my best tips for dealing with behaviors in the inclusion setting. Be on the Same Page I work in a teamed middle school. My team consists of a math teacher, ELA, Science, Social Studies, a supplementary math class teacher, a specialist, a paraprofessional and myself, the special education teacher. I find that dealing with students who present behavior…
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Accommodations for Writing
I find helping students to write to be very challenging. For some people, it comes naturally and for some people, it can be a life long struggle. When I am developing an IEP with the parents and the rest of the team, it is important to include accommodations for students who have a writing disability so that they can be successful in the classroom. I have compiled a list of accommodations to share with you that could be helpful for your students. Obviously there is never a one size fits all solution to helping students. But these are just different ideas that I have tried for different students. Students who…
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Accommodations for Students with Dyscalculia
Working with students with Dyscalculia can be challenging. Students who have dyscalculia tend to have difficulty with number sense, manipulating numbers, and completing computation among other things. Supporting these students in your classroom can be challenging. Dyscalculia will mostly affect them in math, but I have had students who are affected by it in science class also because of the math necessary for topics like Chemistry. If you are concerned that your child is affected by Dyscalculia, it may be time for you to have a conversation with your child’s teachers. Often these students qualify for special education services due to having a Specific Learning Disability in the area of…
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Repair a Strained Co-Teaching Relationship
Co-Teaching has proven to be a great tool for reaching all students. It allows students with disabilities to be taught in the general education classroom giving them opportunities for social interactions with their typical peers. It also allows for students without disabilities who may be struggling to receive the support of having two teachers in the room. These are only two of the many benefits of the inclusion model. But, for the co-teaching model to work in your classroom, the teachers need to be able to work well together. Good co-teaching requires multiple teachers to be on the same page; for them to co-plan, co-assess, and co-teach. When two co-teachers…
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Back to School Checklist!
Well, it’s that time of year. Us teachers in Mass are gearing up to go back to school. Some of you teachers down south are probably back already, but we’re all in the back to school season! Going back to school can be stressful, especially if you are starting a new position or at a new school. I am going to share with you my back to school priorities. Get your caseload In previous years I was able to get a rough draft of my caseload in the spring. This year was different as my position was getting shuffled around through the summer. And now, it is the eve of…
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Differentiated Worksheets
Being able to meet the needs of all of the learners in your classroom can be a challenge. You have students who are struggling with the work in the same class as students who are excelling. You don’t want to leave the struggling students behind but you also want to be challenging the advanced students. When you leave advanced students unattended, they get bored and can become behavior problems. Because of this, I created differentiated worksheets. These worksheets cover all of the topics of solving equations but do it at varying levels of difficulty. Level A Worksheets The worksheets that are in the Level A group have all problems that…
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Finding Your Role as a Co-Teacher
Preface: Most of this post is going to be from the perspective of the special education teacher, only because that is my personal role and what I know more about. But a lot of these tips can be great for any co-teacher to read. Co-Teaching can be a delicate relationship. You walk into another teacher’s classroom and you’re ideally supposed to take over half of the power. It often feels like you are an intruder and you are not even sure if you’re welcome. A lot of teachers have routines and habits, they don’t want someone coming in and changing everything up. But, your district wants to move toward an…
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Special Education Guide: What is an FBA?
What is it? FBA stands for a Functional Behavioral Analysis. It is a fancy way of saying we take a LOT of data to figure out what is motivating a student’s behavior. An FBA can be done when the student is exhibiting dangerous behaviors, but it does not have to be. If a student is consistently falling asleep in class, or doing another task avoidance behavior you can do an FBA for that. You can use it to determine if there are specific situations or tasks that are prompting the behavior. When do we use it? We perform an FBA when we have a student that has behavior challenges. The…
