Real Teachers-Real Strategies 10: Being Prepared for the World of Work

 Teaching Tips, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Mar 082012
 

This post is from our #1 voted winner: Susie in Minerva, OH. Preparing her high school students for the work force is as important as ever in today’s economy. She truly believes in her students and their ability to be active and productive members in their community after high school. Susie helps her students to prepare for this new world with every tool she can provide them.

The Project: Being Prepared for the World of  Work.

I teach a transition life skills class to students with multiple disabilities. I use the School-to-Work DVD series with worksheets I have made up and some home made video’s using a Flip Camera to show students role playing and real life situations about being prepared for work and how to interact at work. The students are engaged when watching the video’s of real job skills and sites where they can learn job skills and possibly become employed.

Learning Objectives:

Students will see past graduates in their current jobs putting into place some of the job skills/ life skills that we emphasize in our classroom daily. Students can see good and bad ways of dealing with different situations that may occur on a job site through role playing videos. Students will then get to go into those same job sites and experience some of the same situations and know how to respond or interact appropriately.

Materials:

Flip Camera, other “getting a job” curriculum, transition planning materials, job sites and real employees/employers. The Functional Skills System: Social Skills or Workplace Social Skills. The Life Skills Readers and other Read-to-Learn library sets are also great tools. I would like to use iPods/iPads to also run the videos on and take video for immediate reinforcement learning. PCI’s Getting Along with People Series would be a nice addition to what we are teaching as well.

Susie also says:

I very much love my job, and the materials and resources available have come along way since I began teaching 12 years ago. Thank you for continuing to look for interactive and engaging materials that can reach the students I work with. In the world today where it is getting more and more difficult for the average person to find employment has made it that much more important for my students who already have struggles to work through to be even more prepared for the world they will soon enter.

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Brought to you by We Are Teachers partnership with PCI Education’s Teacher Grant: http://http://www.weareteachers.com/teaching-ideas/grant/teaching-idea?app= 18246&grantId=75

 

Routines Equal Success and Comfort for Students With Special Needs

 Special Education Classroom  No Responses »
Oct 092009
 

by Jill Haney

HoldingHandsIn the past month, two events have reminded me of the importance routines play in the lives of children with special needs. At my daughter’s “Meet the Teacher” night, she discovered that the only classmate from kindergarten in her first grade class is a boy with Down’s Syndrome who she befriended last year. He has limited speech and primarily uses gestures to communicate. When he came into the classroom to meet his new teacher, he was completely confused. He had expected that going back to school meant going back to the teacher he had the year before. His mother and the first grade teacher did everything they could to make him feel comfortable, but to him, the new classroom felt “wrong.”

My own four-year-old son has autism and is nonverbal. This summer, we had him going to private behavioral and occupational therapy five mornings a week. Two weeks after school started, we cut back to three mornings a week knowing he had school every afternoon. In talking to his teacher this week, she noted that he was simply not himself the past two weeks. And we have noticed at home that on mornings he doesn’t have therapy, he frequently grabs his backpack and paces in front of the door assuming that doing so will make the school bus come. I am reminded of a fellow mom in our local autism support group who noted that her son needs three weeks to truly adjust and settle into a new classroom or situation.

All humans rely on routines. Routines provide us with a comfort zone. When we know what to expect, we can relax a bit and focus on getting the task done. Not knowing what to expect tends to be a major source of anxiety and stress. This stress is especially extreme for children with special needs when routines change.

As a parent, I have learned to work on transition skills to help my son cope with changes in routine. But as an educator and author, I have also learned to craft curriculum and activities that facilitate success through predictable routines. Establishing lesson cycles with predictable stages allows students to focus on the content they need to learn rather than stress about what is expected. This concept is a central part of every major program I have co-written, including PCI Reading Program and Environmental Print Series.

Harnessing the power of routines can help all students successfully navigate both academic and daily life challenges. For students with special needs, established routines are even more critical for student success and should be an integral part of any classroom schedule or core curriculum.

Character Education, Lasting Effects

 Special Education Classroom  No Responses »
Oct 022009
 

A Curriculum That Builds Character and Reading Comprehension Skills

Character education has long been a shared responsibility of parents, teachers and members of the community throughout history. It is a learning process that should be exemplified in a school community to help students understand, care about and act on such core ethical values as respect, justice, civic virtue and citizenship, and responsibility for self and others. These core values serve as the foundation of our society.

Whether a student has learning disabilities, developmental disabilities, or special needs, developing a strong character is essential to everyone. It affects developing good behavior skills and social skills as well. Because students spend much of their day in classrooms, teachers have an opportunity to explain and reinforce core values upon which character is formed.

Character education must be approached comprehensively to include the emotional, intellectual and moral qualities of a person or group. We must offer multiple opportunities for students to learn about, discuss and enact positive social behaviors so that being a person of strong character becomes a part of a student’s beliefs and actions. We must practice character for it to have a lasting effect.

PCI Education has designed a curriculum that provides diverse activities to develop character, practice positive behavior skills, and build reading comprehension called Bugg Books.  These books infuse important life skills into engaging tales and entice struggling readers. As the main characters in each book work through everyday situations, they learn the value of good citizenship and having a strong character. The Bugg Books character lessons include:

•  getting along with others
•  learning to share
•  practice makes perfect
•  dealing with bullies
•  respecting others
•  sticking to the truth
•  facing your fears
•  paying attention
•  doing your best
•  consequences of stealing
•  the trouble with tattling
•  believing in yourself
•  controlling your anger

Teaching character education along with reading comprehension skills is easy with the Bugg Books. The curriculum features two distinct lessons and exercises for each of the books in the series. The first lesson focuses on reading comprehension. The second lesson focuses on the character education lesson of the book with a wide variety of activities to specifically engage students in the lesson, extend it to their own everyday situations, and make personal connections. The curriculum also includes activities that families can do at home to reinforce each lesson.

Students with special needs, learning differences, or developmental disabilities can also evolve in character education, understand social values and learn positive behavior skills. It is vitally important we instill core values in all our children so they, too, can embody and teach the next generation a strong sense of character, values, and citizenship.

Within the character of the citizen lies the welfare of the nation. — Cicero

Real-World Teaching Challenges

 Teaching Tips  1 Response »
Jul 132009
 

learn3

Teaching to 21st Century Special Ed Students

Teachers face challenges today unmatched by past generations. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are still the basic skills taught, but far more advanced. Then add the new requirements for teaching, a myriad of guidelines of what to teach, and standardized testing teachers aren’t allowed to teach to, a very different landscape and scope of teaching has emerged. As well, teachers are also encouraged to help cultivate social skills in their students so they can be productive members of their community. These demands, coupled with the varying learning differences and emotional or behavioral needs of special needs students, can be overwhelming.

 

In an effort to make so many pieces a little more fluid rather than separately taught concepts, the following are suggestions for combining real-world learning with already-in-place classroom practices. These ideas connect how the subjects taught in school are relevant to everyday life skills. Perhaps these will also enable you to maximize your time-use for better efficiency and effectiveness.

 

Meaningful cooperative learning.

Survey what skills your students already know using this as a starting point. Cooking uses math skills. Going to a birthday party utilizes social skills, or attending family events exercises behavior skills. Making lists or sending Thank You notes uses writing skills. Every person comes to a group with a different set of experiences, skills, and opinions. Encourage students to share their personal knowledge base, which can then be built upon. Using open discussions develops communication skills and teaches peer cooperation. Students’ unique observations of their environment or researching a specific subject matter are directly relevant to nurturing critical thinking skills, which they use every day to learn at school.

 

Writing relevancy.

Facilitate students’ understanding that writing skills are important in almost every career and aspect of real life. Ask them how they think you would use writing to do your job and how they would use writing at home and in school. Encourage students to use writing as a sounding board for presenting their thoughts, opinions, and ideas to the world and even to their parents. Make writing fun by allowing students to share their distinct voices on a topic of their choice. For those students who struggle with the process of writing by hand, allow word processing as an alternative.

 

Multidisciplinary discovery process.

Help students understand how curricular areas are interconnected to each other and to their life. Point out that the subjects learned in school have a real impact on daily living as well as their history. Even if the subject matter taught in school is not relevant to a career they are considering or what their parents do, you can help them make the connection that the thought processes needed to understand each subject is related to work skills their parents use or they will use themselves one day.

 

Drawing real-world connections so that students understand WHY they have to learn what you are teaching will make the learning more relevant. Understanding how this is significant in-the-now could be the difference they need for academic success.

 

Authored by Rachel Kaspar

Elementary Life Skill Lesson #263

 Teaching Tips  No Responses »
Jun 242009
 

secrets2TAMING THE TATTLE MONSTER IN THE INCLUSIVE CLASSROOM

Tattling is a common, annoying problem encountered in every elementary school nationwide, every day, in special needs and regular ed classrooms alike. Because children this age are still developing their sense of right and wrong behavior, they can take keeping or breaking the rules quite seriously, as demonstrated with tattling. Teachers know it’s not only disruptive, but also time-consuming to handle efficiently and effectively.

In an age when violence in schools rages through the media, students need to know there is a time and a place when telling on a peer is the right thing to do. It is vitally necessary they understand the difference in tattling on a classmate to get them in trouble, and reporting a student doing or speaking of something dangerous or talking about hurting someone.

The following are two easy ideas to teach the differences between tattling and reporting and reinforce basic social skills in the inclusive classroom. As well, these exercises refine fundamental behavior skills for special ed students, students with learning differences, and special needs children:

• Create a classroom “Tattle Book.” Using a spiral notebook, instruct students to write their daily grievances in the book instead of tattling to an adult. If you have students that have learning differences or are struggling learners challenged by writing or spelling, tell them to only write two or three key words that describe what was said or done that bothered them. Take some time at the end of each day as a class to sort out the “tattles” from the “reports.”

• Lead a class discussion. Ask students how it feels to be “tattled” on. This will help those who are prone to tattling understand that their actions have consequences, such as not getting to play with others or losing a friend’s trust. Appeal to your students for their input to help those frequent “tattlers” understand the difference between “tattling” and “reporting.”

Our goal as educators is help students learn to make good choices, respect themselves and others, and be productive citizens. As we teach children the difference between tattling and reporting, we are teaching them important behavior and social skills, and leading them down the road to becoming responsible people in school, at home, and in the community. 

 

Article Authored by Rachel Kaspar