Real Teachers-Real Strategies 11: The Spelling Game

 Teaching Tips, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Mar 212012
 

From Manning, SC, we are pleased to share with you our second place PCI/We Are Teachers Teacher Grant Winner, Adela. She is a Resource Teacher for 7th and 8th graders. Adela’s strategy is making spelling a fun activity to keep her students engaged, which in turn strengthens her students’ vocabulary and spelling skills.

The Project: Let’s Learn How to Spell.  

Each student thinks of or finds 2 words containing at least 5 letters and is hard to spell. Using Ran Barnes strategies with the “Paper Plate” spelling game, each student writes their words on a paper plate and places them on a table top. Next, a student is chosen to stand in front of the class with their word-plate facing the other students and pronounces their word for the class. The other students then look for the word-plates that have letters that the word in front of them contains. Making this spelling exercise a game helps the students learn new words and how to spell them.

Learning Objectives:

Because the majority of students struggle with spelling and vocabulary, we know that making the task fun to do will improve both spelling and vocabulary.

Materials:

Paper plates, markers or crayons, and “The Differentiated Classroom: Challenging All Students, NOT Dummying Down For Some” by Ran Barnes.

* * *

Brought to you by We Are Teachers partnership with PCI Education’s Teacher Grant Ask: http://www.weareteachers.com/teaching-ideas/grant/teaching-idea?app=17318&grantId=75

 

 

Real Teachers-Real Strategies 4: Conflict Resolution Skills

 Teaching Tips  2 Responses »
Jan 242012
 

Our next post is from Lisa from Suffolk, VA, a middle school/high school Special Education teacher. Her strategy is to teach conflict resolution skills with differentiated instruction so each student can learn the skill according to how they learn best.

Her strategy: a Conflict Resolution Menu.

“The students have been learning a unit on how to deal appropriately with conflict. Proper problem solving skills and techniques to all types of possible conflicts they may come across. Since all students learn differently, I created a unit assessment that was Differentiated Instructional (DI) focused. This menu has 3 appetizer activites, 3 entree activities, and 3 dessert activities to choose from. Each student may choose the activities they feel most comfortable doing to demonstrate mastery.”

Learning Objectives:

“The students will demonstrate their knowledge on conflict resolution and problem solving techniques that they can carry with them into adulthood. These skills will help them handle peer conflicts, issues with teachers, and even frustration that may occur from academics. Being able to properly identify a conflict and the appropriate way to handle that conflict is a skill that will help them be successful in school as well as in life.”

Materials:

Conflict resolution lesson, art supplies, conflict resolution menu, problem solving scale, PowerPoint (student choice)

 * * *

This post is brought to you by We Are Teachers partnership with PCI Education’s Grant Asks: http://www.weareteachers.com/ideas/partnerask/teachingidea?app= 17846&grantId=75

 

Real Teachers-Real Strategies 3: Engaging Reluctant Readers & Writers

 Special Education Classroom, Teaching Tips  No Responses »
Jan 192012
 

This post comes from Jennifer in Lima, New York. She is a 1st-2nd grade teacher in Special Education, and her strategy is to help reluctant readers and writers get excited about doing just that: reading and writing!

Her project: Language Experience Stories. 

 

 “Students who are not yet excited about reading or who are hesitant to write need a hook. So we made them the characters in the story. I surveyed the children regarding things they like to do. They chose swimming. We created a list of things they did when swimming. I then brought in a blow up swimming pool and other items (floaties, pool toys). We then took pictures of them in the (empty) pool using the item or pretending to swim. From the pictures they wrote their sentences for their stories.”

Learning Objectives:

“Students learned to plan out a story, write their own sentences and then read their story to others. Their confidence grew and they were very proud of their accomplishments. When writing students used a promethean board rather than paper and pencil to make it different for them. Here they were more willing to stretch out the words and were more willing to stay on task.

“The children who created these stories were not enthusiastic about reading or writing prior to writing these stories. During the process they became more involved and excited. Once the story was complete and in their hands they loved it! Not only were they authors who could read their story, they were in the story! They wanted a copy to keep in their classroom and one to have at home. Parents also shared how proud their children were when they brought these stories home.”

Materials:

“With this story it was chart paper, a blow up pool, pool toys, floaties, camera, and a promethean board. Computer and printer were used to create and print the book. With other language experience stories the materials were different depending on the topic that they chose.”

 * * *

Brought to you by We Are Teachers partnership with PCI Education’s Teacher Grant Asks: http://www.weareteachers.com/ideas/partnerask/teachingidea?app=16609&grantId=75

 

Real Teachers-Real Strategies 2: A Radio Broadcast

 Special Education Classroom, Teaching Tips  No Responses »
Jan 162012
 

Our second post in this series is from Matthew in Carteret, NJ. He teaches 7th and 8th graders.

His idea: Fireside Chats.

Students learning about the Great Depression had the opportunity to step into the shoes of President Roosevelt and create their own fireside chat radio broadcast based on the events of the 1930′s. Students learn the material in the classroom and then record an audio broadcast using the software program Audacity. The tasks involved are research, writing a script, and performing the broadcast. The project has different modalities so that each student in the group can shine in his/her own way.

Learning Objectives:

Students will be able to understand the impact that the events of the Great Depression had on America. They will also be able to relate the information they have learned to today’s economy. Students will enhance their research, writing and technology skills throughout the process of the project.

As well, this project was a collaboration between the students’ social studies and language arts classes. It took place in a variety of settings in our 8th grade. Both in-class support students and self-contained students had the opportunity to create their own group broadcast. The students learned tangible skills while also learning the important characteristics of teamwork.

Materials:

Audacity, an opensource audio recording program. Microsoft word, to type the script. Microphones to record the broadcast. EBSCO and Grollier online for research.

* * *

This post is brought to you by We Are Teachers partnership with PCI Education’s Teacher Grant Asks:  http://www.weareteachers.com/ideas/partnerask/teachingidea?app=16996&grantId=75

 

Say It, Rhyme It, Spell It

 Teaching Tools  No Responses »
Nov 102009
 

SayIt-RhymeIt-SpellIt-LogoEmergent Readers and Struggling Readers Have Fun Learning and Discover Reading Success

Say It, Rhyme It, Spell It is an engaging game, made in two levels, that helps emerging readers and struggling readers become familiar with words that follow a consonant-vowel-consonant (c-v-c) pattern. The reproducible worksheets binder can be used in conjunction with the board game, as a stand-alone program or supplement to another reading program. Say It, Rhyme It, Spell It Software offers picture representations of words as well as words without pictures for visual learners and students with developmental disabilities to reinforce the foundation and skills needed to begin reading and strengthen the reading skill process.

 

Playing the interactive board game or software game helps struggling learners develop phonological awareness. Students begin to understand individual sounds apart from words, how sounds form words, how words begin and end, and how to recognize parts and patterns of words. Once students recognize the parts and patterns of words and associate them with the letters of the alphabet, they begin to equate sounds with symbols. This is the beginning of reading. By playing these games, students improve their phonological awareness and learn to recognize, identify, spell, and rhyme c-v-c words with the most common letter patterns.

 

Say It, Rhyme It, Spell It 1 & 2 both consist of a game board and 150 draw cards. The game board features 28 squares. Each square has an icon to represent one of the possible tasks to complete during the game. As a student lands on a square, he or she selects a draw card from the appropriate stack and completes the designated task: saying a word, rhyming a word, or spelling a word. Say It, Rhyme It, Spell It 2 progresses in difficulty from the first board game by using c-v-c-c and c-c-v-c short vowel word patterns.

 

Say It, Rhyme It, Spell It is appropriate for a wide variety of classrooms, including specialized reading programs, language arts, resource, inclusive, and ESL classrooms. These easy-to-play games help students learn to read c-v-c,  c-v-c-c and c-c-v-c short vowel word pattern words and establish the foundation or reinforcement of reading skills for emergent readers, struggling readers, and students with specials needs and learning differences.

 

To encourage parental involvement and reinforcement of emerging reading skills at home, reproducible activities and a parent letter are included. These take-home activities provide an easy way for students to practice saying, rhyming, and spelling words.

 

Product Developed and Authored by Rosie Simms

 

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.

Coupons as Math Manipulatives

 Teaching Tips  1 Response »
Oct 082009
 

Teach Number Operations and Practical Life Skills Using Coupons

PCI1857-Coupon-Math-Coupon

by Kristine Lindsay

Finding special education resources to teach students that are on a level that isn’t too childish for older students but appealing to all students with special needs, and that do not have to be overly modified to fit your students’ learning abilities can be a challenge. Teaching basic number operations in a meaningful way to children with learning disabilities needs to be applicable to their lives to retain the information and build real-world life skills.

Students with learning differences and in special education classes learn basic number operations best through real-world applications. Coupons are a convenient and fun tool in helping struggling learners improve their mathematic skills in relevant ways.

When I taught in a special education elementary classroom, I found that my students were able to add and subtract monetary amounts better when the materials related to a life skill they could use or observe daily. I created several hands-on strategies using coupons and grocery store ads that helped struggling learners improve their addition, subtraction, and problem-solving skills.

Here are some of the strategies I used successfully with individuals and in group activities:

Needed Materials: a variety of coupon flyers and multiple grocery store ads

1. Parts and Purpose of a Coupon: Have students create grocery lists with 3 items and look through coupon flyers to find as many coupons as they can for those items. Have students identify the coupons’ attributes, including product, value, brand, restrictions, and expiration dates. Discuss the purposes of coupons and when they do or do not save shoppers money. Explain that students may find several coupons for an item, but the “best deal” is based on price, coupon value, or size/quantity of the item.

2. Subtraction: Give students pre-made grocery receipts, listing 3 items and their prices with a subtotaled amount. Have students find a coupon for one of the items on the list. Students will subtract the values of the coupons from their subtotals to find the totals to be paid. Discuss what using a coupon does to the total amount paid.

3. Addition and Subtraction: Give students pre-made grocery receipts listing 5 items and their prices with a subtotaled amount. Have students find one coupon per item on their lists, knowing that some items will not have coupons. Then, have students add the values of their coupons and subtract the total values of the coupons from the receipts’ subtotals. Discuss what using several coupons does to the total amount paid.

4. Two-Step Problems: Instruct students to create a shopping list of 5-8 items and try to find one coupon per item. Then, have students add their items’ prices to find a subtotal, and add their coupons’ values. Subtract the coupons’ values from their subtotals to find their total amounts paid. Students can swap lists with other groups for more practice.

For more activities and practice sheets on using coupons as math manipulatives, see the Coupon Math program I wrote that was inspired by my teaching needs for special education materials that are relevant and fun. This program is an appropriate elementary special education curriculum for introducing and reinforcing addition, subtraction, two-step problems, and problem-solving strategies. It is also a great secondary special ed resource for reviewing and reteaching number operations and money concepts to middle school and high school students with special needs.

Special Education is PCI’s Specialty

 Special Education Classroom  No Responses »
Sep 102009
 

Academic Materials Tailored to a Variety of Special Needs

2008 PCILogoNew  by Kristina M. Swann                       

Several years ago, I jumped at the chance to write curriculum and other materials for PCI Education. Previously, as a special education teacher, I had spent hours modifying materials for my students. At PCI, I had the opportunity, along with other former teachers, to create curriculums and worksheets that feature a variety of modifications for students with special needs. We have the unique opportunity to create materials tailored to these students so teachers in the field did not have to go through the extensive modifications on their own any longer.

In my role as teacher, the modifications most frequently included:
•  enlarging the font of a textbook page or worksheet
•  shortening assignments
•  providing study guides so students will know what information they need to know
•  testing only on the most important information

I’m sure many of you can relate that these modifications needed to be accomplished without resulting in pages that look babyish or too different from what other students were using, which is not an easy task. However at PCI Education, the art directors and graphic designers know how to make materials easy to read without being juvenile.

To encompass the variety of special needs and learning differences, PCI’s products are specifically written to these students’ needs to facilitate learning in an inclusion classroom or special ed classroom in these ways:
•  Written at a lower reading level to accommodate struggling readers
•  Are printed in 14-point font
•  Have worksheets that are pleasing to the eye and not visually confusing
•  Questions are broken up into blocks of 5 questions at a time
•  Limiting choices in a word bank
•  Including crossword puzzles that are fun but also provide clues to exercise critical thinking skills
•  Include worksheets that also serve as study guides for the quizzes and tests. Each worksheet tells students on which corresponding student text page they can find the answer.
•  Created to have no surprises on tests and quizzes. Each test question comes from the worksheet pages, and all test and quiz questions have been answered before in a different format.

For example, a true/false question that appeared on a worksheet might appear on the test as a multiple-choice question, like the example below.

1. Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States during the Civil War.
•  True or False?

1. ________________ was President of the United States during the Civil War.
•  A. Abraham Lincoln
•  B. George Washington
•  C. George Bush
•  D. John F. Kennedy

At PCI, our goal is to make it as easy as possible for students to learn and retain the information presented in our student texts. PCI Education prides itself on creating materials that meet academic standards for students with special needs, struggling readers and struggling learners, students with learning differences, and students with intellectual or developmental disabilities.

Um, What Happens After High School?

 Teaching Tips  No Responses »
Sep 042009
 

Incorporating Transition Instruction for Students in Special Education

Research and daily interactions with secondary students support the need for focused instruction in the area of transition, especially students with learning differences, emotional/behavioral needs, mild cognitive disabilities, or students with other special needs. They will be asked to answer what type of career they have an interest in or an aptitude for.

Career research via writing projects can provide valuable information and experiences utilizing critical thinking skills. After researching career options, students with special needs often need assistance charting a transition path and should be encouraged to develop at least two alternate or back up transition plans. An initial outline of their main idea should be put together answering who, what, when, why, where, and how.

Then, the focus needs to be a progression of learning self-advocacy and self-determination skills. It is important for them to know:

  • Their legal rights and responsibilities as an adult with a disability.
  • They understand what type of support they can expect to receive after high school.
  • Students in special ed or with special needs should exit high school with current documentation of their disability to allow a continuation of support services if needed.

These basics along with skills for getting a job and keeping it should be addressed prior to completing an in-depth transition path.

The skills to secure and retain a job need to be taught and practiced along with workplace behavior and social skills. Often the skills of completing applications, interviewing, demonstrating good worker traits and teamwork are expected or at best quickly reviewed. Teaching students’ with special needs how to access and succeed in any of the post secondary options – employment, technical/trade college, college/university, or the military – is crucial. 

Tips for where to begin: 

  • A separate elective course using a transition curriculum
  • Supplementing a regular education “careers” curriculum
  • Integrating it into a self-contained classroom
  • Providing additional assistance during a resource period
  • Coordinate with other teachers for writing and/or research assignments that would work for both classes

There are many resources in a variety of mediums specifically designed and written for students in special education and students with special needs. Several examples of curriculums offered are:

  • Career Folio Curriculum is a reproducible activity binder that contains everything needed to organize relevant career facts into one meaningful whole for students, including blackline masters to help students organize their own Career Folios as well as a career action plan and post-program goals.
  • Career Planning includes student text and an audio cd library, plus teaching strategies, application activities, ideas for classroom projects, and tips on learning styles. Covers a variety of skills job seekers need-reference gathering, résumé writing, communication, interviewing, working with others, and managing time.
  • Everyday Life Skills is a textbook and video series that is a comprehensive career development program for high school students making the transition to postsecondary life. This curriculum focuses on the important “how to live and work” issues not always covered by regular curricular materials. Interactive cd’s and audio cassettes are also part of the curriculum.

Getting the Words Right

 Teaching Tips  1 Response »
Aug 242009
 

boy-and-blocksVocabulary Tactics in an Inclusive Classroom  by Kristina Swann

We know that learning vocabulary is an essential first step to learning anything. Obviously, students must learn vocabulary while learning to read, but they must also learn vocabulary for every subject they study. Each subject comes with its own vernacular. Without basic knowledge of the vocabulary of a topic, understanding the subject would be hard at best, but vocabulary can be especially challenging for special needs children and students with autism or those with learning differences.

In today’s inclusiveclassrooms, vocabulary development is more important than ever before. There is a growing number of students with learning differences and special needs challenges and students who are English language learners.

These are some things I used while teaching and reinforcing vocabulary in my inclusive classroom:

• Use multiple methods of review and reinforcement of terms. Students can match terms to definitions, sort terms into categories, or identify the correct term from a list of choices.

• Practice vocabulary in a fun way. For example, play vocabulary bingo with your students. You can also turn reviews into a rhyming game or a sing-along. Depending on the age of your students, they could even be engaged to make their own song or rap to remember the words.

• Make vocabulary visual. Put up a word wall. Students will be able to see the vocabulary words every day when they walk into the classroom. If you have a few extra minutes between lessons or at the end of a class, call on volunteers to define words from the word wall or put them in sentences. Reward students for answering correctly.

• Use technology. Instructional software programs are a fantastic way to provide extra practice to students who need it most.

• Use the words. Once you have taught students a vocabulary word, use it. For example, if you have taught students the word “subtract,” don’t use the phrase “take away” anymore when teaching about subtraction. Say “subtract” every time you address the topic.

• Get students to own their vocabulary words. Have students make up definitions in their own words. Have them write words in sentences and draw pictures to represent the words and their definitions. Letting students take control of the words while they are learning them allows students to keep those words with them for the long term.

 Older Entries