By Sara Finegan

I’ve written about what inclusion most definitely isn’t, and about what special education most definitely should be, and even made some comments about what special education instruction in a general education environment is supposed to look like.

That’s all well and good, if you’re looking to get a taste off of the menu that is Special Education, but it doesn’t constitute a meal, nor, more importantly, does it give you the recipes with which to create one.

What we all really want to know these days is what “Accessing Grade-Level Standards” looks like, whether it takes place in a separate classroom or in a general ed class.

Let me give it a shot, via a hypothetical set of students with IEPs.  Let’s follow this mythical cohort through the fourth and fifth grades, not because those grade levels are the most typical or constitute a more crucial pair of years than any other, but because that’s what I’ve been looking at for the last month, and unless there’s an offer of chocolate, we’re all going to look at things for the next few pages through my eyes.

The Cast of Characters

We begin with the diverse mix of students, whom we encounter at the beginning of the fourth grade:

Matt is a cheerful, restless student with mental retardation.  He knows 50 sight words, can count to 30, and likes to listen to stories.  He has limited social skills, and needs a high level of structure in order to be able to participate in any large-group activities.  Matt, who has limited verbal skills, loves to identify and label things and has an excellent memory for the names of things he’s learning about.  He can copy words and sentences, but does not construct sentences of his own without a great deal of support.  Matt is easily frustrated in a large-group environment and often disrupts class by knocking objects off desks and chewing on other students’ zippers and hoods.

Alex is a highly-functioning student with autism and ADHD.  He has difficulty with visual tracking and this, combined with his attention deficits, makes reading extremely difficult.  He reads reluctantly and is easily distracted from the text.  He has an enormous vocabulary and can dictate complex paragraphs, but the mechanics of writing is difficult for him due to dysgraphia.  Alex has excellent cognitive and reasoning skills and can apply what he’s learned across multiple subjects.  He is easily overwhelmed in large groups, needs a lot of repeated drill and small group, guided work in order to learn new skills, and needs to keep moving.  If he sits for more than five minutes, he begins to “zone out” and gets lost in his own world.

Freddy has moderate-functioning autism and mild mental retardation.  He perseverates on whatever he was watching on television while he ate breakfast.  He is anxious to please adults and, while he enjoys being with his classmates, has few friendships and doesn’t show much interest in others’ needs or likes and dislikes.  He remembers every new word he learns in his reading, and as a result, his sight words vocabulary is enormous.  His decoding skills are less strong, but he is currently reading at about the beginning second-grade level.  Fred loves to take the morning survey in class, and carries his clipboard around to each student, tabulating their responses to the day’s questions.  He can write a sentence describing the results of the survey.

Ben is an English Language learner with expressive and receptive language deficits, auditory memory deficits, and working memory deficits.  He has many friends, encourages people to do their best, but is also easily distracted and can disrupt his table by making faces, tossing paper wads, and chatting when lessons are going on.  Ben’s writing skills are very limited:  he struggles to be consistent with singulars and plurals as well as verb tenses, and uses very bland, generic vocabulary.  His thinking is not particularly organized and he jumps from topic to topic in conversation and writing.  Ben reads at the second grade level and has good literal comprehension.

Martina is the class artist.  She spends hours working on craft projects and can be found drawing and making costumes for paper dolls in her spare time.  She works extremely slowly at academic tasks, which in the past frustrated her general education teachers, and, as a result, caused her to lose confidence in her own abilities.  She reads at the third grade level and has excellent critical thinking skills.  Her writing is less strong, as she lacks organization and structure, and her spelling is poor.  Like Ben, Martina’s primary language is Spanish.  Martina takes three times as long as anyone else to complete assignments, but is thorough and methodical and neat, and rarely makes mistakes.  She excels at social studies and invariably wins the class Jeopardy! Games.

Toby is an excellent reader and thinker who lacks executive functioning skills.  His desk is a mess, his work is all over the room, he loses everything, and he forgets his homework four days out of five.   He is three grades behind in math and reads at grade level.  He rushes through most assignments and pays attention to about 45% of what is going on during instruction.  He is articulate, uses powerful vocabulary in speech and in writing, and participates actively in class discussions.

Amanda is  a very bright kiddo with a bubbly personality.  She struggles with multiple-step tasks and her working memory is extremely limited.  She has low numeracy and, despite years of work, doesn’t know what makes ten, cannot remember her multiplication facts, and cannot do grade-level math.  She reads at the third grade level and, although her spelling is atrocious, writes descriptive pieces about topics that interest her.  When it comes to narrative writing, she exhibits less skills – her tendency is to skip details and important parts of the story, leaving the reader to try to figure out what’s going on.  Amanda is very emotional and struggles with friendship skills – she prefers to play with kids who are 2-3 years younger than she is.  She has severe ADHD and medication helps a bit, but not as much as for some other kids in the class.

Sam has Asperger Syndrome (which is now considered a mild version of Autism Spectrum Disorder) and ADHD.  He also is a profoundly anxious child with limited social skills.  He is easily frustrated by academic tasks and has difficulty paying attention and understanding what is going on in class.  He loves science and sports, and will listen to anyone read stories for hours on end.  Sam needs repeated review and drill on a daily basis in order to master new skills or understand new concepts.  After 20 minutes or so in a large-group, fast-paced setting, Sam often has a melt-down, and either tantrums or cries, which causes his peers to make fun of him.

Grant has moderate-functioning autism with accompanying hyperlexia. He can decode any text but doesn’t understand much of what he reads.  He loves Sponge Bob and The Doors, and marching to his internal beat.  Grant doesn’t do well in groups or cooperative learning activities but is an excellent sight words and spelling coach.   When it comes to auditory processing, you can forget it:  Grant doesn’t process much of what he hears, but has amazing visual perceptual skills and remembers everything he sees.

These nine students can and will learn grade-level science and social studies in the fourth and fifth grades.

Fourth and Fifth Grade Science and Social Studies Standards:

In California, fourth grade science includes a unit on Magnets and Electricity, one on Rocks and Minerals, and one on Biomes and the Food Chain.  Social Studies focuses on the history of California.  Fifth grade science involves learning about the human circulatory, digestive and respiratory systems, water and the water cycle and the weather.   In Social Studies, students learn about American history, from the Meso-American civilizations to just before the Civil War.

Whether the kids are in a Special Day Class or mainstreamed into a general education class, they will need differentiated instruction and assignments.  This is what the fourth grade science class might look like:

Rocks, Minerals  and Erosion Unit:

Types of Rock:

• The entire class sings the Rock Cycle Song every day at least once.  The lyrics, sung to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, provide an excellent way of memorizing the facts about Sedimentary, Igneous and Metamorphic rocks.
• All of the kids have the opportunity to work on three hands-on projects:  Make your Own Sediment; Sedimentary Rock In A Bottle; and  Make a Metamorphic Rock.
• Matt, Freddy and Sam read easy-reader books such as “Rocks”, and “Crystals”.  Grant, Alex, and Ben participate in a guided reading group to read “The Rock Family” and “Digging for Dinosaurs.”   All of them gather with the class for a read-aloud of “Dinosaur Hunters” and Martina and Toby serve as table leaders when the class discusses fossils.
• The teacher has prepared two sets of sorting cards with photos of different kinds of rocks (limestone, sandstone, slate, agate, quartz, etc) and cards with the names of rocks.  Every day, kids get together with a partner to match the words to the photos, or to use the cards for a Memory game.  Students use a classroom chart or, in the case of Toby, Ben, Alex, Martina, Amanda and Grant, their “rocks and minerals journal” in which they’ve filled in graphic organizers about different types of rocks and minerals.
  

  Sorting cards

• Freddy, Sam, and Matt like to take the teacher’s collection of small rocks and minerals and sort them, putting them in labeled squares on a 3×3 piece of wood.   Amanda and Martina and Toby often supervise, prompting the three boys to speak in complete sentences about at least three of the rocks they sort.  (ex: “This is a piece of quartz.  It is pink.”;  “Sandstone is a sedimentary rock.”)
• Matt, Sam and Freddy complete a sequencing activity based on the text “A Rock Collection”, which the teacher has copied, cut up, and laminated.  After listening to a peer or an aide read the story, they work independently or together to put the story parts in the proper order.  In the meantime, Martina, Amanda and Toby, having read the story, write a summary of it.  Alex and Ben also write a summary, but they use a word list provided by the teacher and a sentence starter for each paragraph.

Erosion and Changes to the Earth’s Surface

• All of the students listen to several read-alouds by the teacher using picture books about glaciers, volcanos, and earthquakes.
• Freddy and Sam sit with an aide and read “After the Flood” together.  The aide helps them make a list of things that floods and water do to the earth’s surface.
• The kids watch a short film about the San Francisco Earthquake.  A peer or aide reads from the textbook to the kids about earthquakes and the earth’s surface.  The higher level kids work in partners to answer questions from the textbook, while the lower level kids start working on sorting cards and sight words using the vocabulary for the unit.
• Matt, Freddy, and Sam read about what to do in an earthquake.  They work with an aide to make posters to display in the classroom telling people what to do.
• The kids watch a short film about the Grand Canyon.  The higher level kids create a thinking map in their journals about what they learned about water and wind erosion.  The lower level kids get coloring pages about the Grand Canyon to color and, when they’re done, write a sentence about each picture at the bottom.
• The higher level kids complete a cloze activity about glaciers.  All of the kids work on daily review activities, identifying types of events and weather that affect the earth’s surface and whether they are fast or slow influences.
• After a mini-lesson about how water affects the Earth’s surface (weathering, transport, and deposition), the kids participate in a variety of activities in which they identify which part of the process pertains to a photo or event.
• All of the kids do a culminating report on either volcanos, wind and water erosion, glaciers, or earthquakes.
  • The higher level kids work in small groups to complete graphic organizers as a pre-writing activity, and then, once they’ve completed their first drafts, participate in editing and revising activities using a class-generated rubric.  They are expected to type their reports on the computer and use spell check and  any other aids such as a thesaurus and grammar check, if available.
  • The lower level kids use templates which pictures to identify and sentence starters about each of the different things they’ve learned.  All but Matt are expected to write one general statement and give 2 supporting details for each fact about their topic.  Matt gets a set of labels on which the teacher has typed vocabulary words for his topic and he sticks them underneath the pictures on his graphic organizer template.

accessing grade-level · ADHD · autism · decoding · differentiated instruction · dysgraphia · executive functioning · expressive language · grade-level standards · hyperlexia · Inclusion · low numeracy · modifications · receptive language · Sara Finegan · science · social studies · sorting cards · standards · vocabulary

By Sara Finegan

Now that I’ve got the standards identified and turned into tamed beasts, I turn my attention to the resources I’m going to need to teach them.  This is where I become a sleuth, poring through books and magazines and the internet to find materials to use in the classroom.  The following are some of the places I’ve used to build a bank of resources for use in my classroom and to support IEP students in the general education environment as well.

•  English Language Learner resources in your district

Most districts don’t have a ton of lower-level reading materials that can be used in  conjunction with grade-level science and social studies units.  Some, however, have materials for English Language Learners, and those should be grabbed by you whenever possible and used as a part of your instruction.  Second Language learning materials use simplified text and have more visual resources than the general ed texts we have in our classrooms.  If your district has them, find them and get at least one set.

• Visit the book room for primary grade materials

Most schools have a book room or closet containing books that teachers can use at a variety of levels.  One of my schools had a small walk-in closet with shelves full of baskets of leveled books as well as books by topics.    Another one had an entire room with bagged sets of books at each level.  Some were to be used for Extended Day Reading or Intersession classes, but all were available to any teacher who wanted to go through them.

I started at the lowest level and moved my way up, pulling books at every level that were related to anything I was teaching or that my general ed colleagues would be teaching.  I was initially surprised at how much was available from the primer level on up about things like rocks, magnets, landforms, stars and planets, plants, the food chain, and habitats.  I was even more surprised to find books about famous people at even the lowest grade level.

The unit bins that I’ve left for my third, fourth and fifth grade gen ed colleagues to use next year with their inclusion students have books for kids at every reading level.

• Discarded materials

When I first started teaching at the school I am now leaving, my principal didn’t give me the current texts for social studies, language arts, or science.  What she did do was introduce me to the book room at our school, where we had, for many years, an enormous library of discarded textbooks at every grade level.  I was encouraged to take whatever I wanted, and I did.

Discarded text?  you may ask. How exactly does an older version of the fourth grade social studies curriculum help teach my kids who read below grade level?  Hah!  The following are some ways that I have used discarded texts:

• I cut out illustrations and maps from the pages of discarded social studies and science textbooks and paste them on index cards.  In some cases, I label the photos/maps and use them as visual cues for the kids as we are teaching.  In other cases, I put the labels on a separate card, and we use entire sets of cards as sorting  cards.  This is how I got a bunch of pictures of prominent people in the early history of the U.S., and now my kids can play a memory game, matching portraits to names.

• Some social studies textbooks in my district have full-page illustrations that are great for laminating and using in a variety of activities.  I found three old California history texts that had a full-page illustration of each type of resident of California.  I cut them out of the book and laminated them, and now we have an easy-to-read, completely labeled picture of a Spanish explorer, a California Native, a Mexican Ranchero, A Gold Rush Miner, and a Railroad builder.  I can create questions for kids to answer using the illustrations, or let kids use them to write sentences, among other activities.

• Textbooks from lower grades often have stories or information that applies to standards at higher grades.  I found a short and easy story about a pioneer child in a primary grades language arts textbook that my own students can use as we learn about westward expansion.  There was a nice little story about the American flag in an old first grade book that I cut out and laminated for my students.   On more than one occasion I’ve found texts I can use for upper grades science instruction in a kindergarten or first grade book.  You just never know! 

• Districts don’t just discard textbooks; there are a variety of other books and materials that become outdated and can be culled for use in differentiated instruction.  In past years, I’ve been able to find timelines to post in my room for history units, supplementary math workbooks to use, graphic organizers, maps, two globes,  posters, and games designed to use with specific textbook activities. 

• Other teachers have given me old story books they no longer use, and that’s how I’ve obtained a goodly number of Native American tales, easy biographies of scientists, books about farm life to use in colonial and pioneer units, fiction stories about fish to use in an ocean habitat unit, and picture books about stars and the solar system to use in science instruction.  I recently found a whole booklet a fellow teacher, at the kindergarten level, had given me about Native Americans.  It had been part of a Thanksgiving unit or something, but it contained a plethora of things I could use in American history at levels all of my students could read.

All kinds of books can be recycled and re-used in any classroom, if you’re creative enough. 

• Teaching materials you can purchase

Awhile back, when I had some extra money for my classroom, I purchased several books of reading material at the second and third grade levels for my kids in the fourth, fifth and sixth grade.  They were put to great use in our reading instruction.   I discovered later that they are also terrific for science and social studies.   In the second  grade reading book, I found short biographies of American leaders, five short texts about plants and plant life, three short pieces about stars, the sun, and galaxies, and about eight pages of text about different aspects of the human body.  All of them provide basic information with comprehension questions to answer, and all of them became parts of my different unit resources for social studies or science.

The third grade book had stories about ocean life, pieces about landforms (mountains, lakes, rivers), and short biographies of famous Native Americans.  Once again, perfect for our upper elementary social studies and science units!

As I was rummaging through my storage bins, I found some first and second grade level readers theater books I’d purchased at around the same time.  To my surprise, they had a bunch of short scripts that could be incorporated into our units of study:  one was about the solar system, one was about Johnny Appleseed, one was about the water cycle, and one was about Plains Indians.  Perfect!

Our local 99 cent store often has things I find useful.  I’ve gotten coloring books that have fairytale characters,  space and solar system pictures, and plants and flowers that can be incorporated into low-level literacy or science unit bins.  I’ve also found playing cards of the different American states, which are fabulous to use in US history.

I wouldn’t spend a lot of money on these kinds of materials, but if you find anything at used bookstores, discount stores, or yard sales, snap them right up.

• The internet:  materials to download

I have spent hours surfing the net for materials I can use with my students.  There are millions of websites with millions of things you can download or copy for free.  Most of my sorting card photos come from google images – the copyright laws allow you to use them in the classroom so long as you don’t disseminate them elsewhere.   I’ve gotten short stories and easy reading texts about science and social studies we have used for years.  I’ve pulled easy-to-read fairy tales and printed them out for kids to use.  You would be surprised at how much free stuff is out there that can be used directly or used to create other materials for our students.

I found a great site that described the different kinds of houses that Native Americans lived in, complete with pictures.  I printed out information on each type of housing on separate sheets of paper to be used in small groups or the document camera.  Even though the text may be too difficult for some kids to read on their own, it can be read aloud to them.  Then, I copied each of the photos and printed them to be used to sorting cards.  Now my students, who will be learning about how Native Americans in each region of the U.S. lived, will be able to match the pictures to the names of the houses, and thus demonstrate what they’ve learned.

• The internet:  materials to download for a fee

Whenever possible, I try to get what I need for teaching without paying anything out of my own pocket.   However, there are a variety of websites that have materials that are available to members who pay a small fee.  Over the years, I’ve purchased one-year memberships and downloaded everything I could before allowing my subscription to lapse.  I now have, saved on my school computer, my home laptop, and a flashdrive, an enormous library of materials that I can pull out as needed.

Enchanted Learning is a teacher website that provides materials and activities, mostly for k-3 levels, on a huge variety of topics.   The fee to join is less than $30, I believe, and  for that money, I’ve gotten booklets, worksheets, and activities related to math, science, social studies, and literary genres.  They form an integral part of my resource bins for both my own classroom and gen ed inclusion:

• The fifth grader with severe cognitive impairment can make a weather words wheel and learn several new sight words.
• The  student reading at grade 1 can learn about famous American leaders by reading easy books about George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Cesar Chavez, and  Martin Luther King.

One thing I love about Enchanted Learning is that each thematic unit has activities that cross strands of the curriculum.  Thus:

• Kids can practice alphabetizing lists of words related to units about the solar system, Christopher Columbus, the weather, seasons, and mammals.
• When we study analogies, kids can practice using facts or ideas related to science or social studies units.
• Similes and Antonym matching sheets are available for most of the science units I’m preparing.

I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth from Enchanted Learning, and no, they have not compensated me for this endorsement at all!

School Express is another one of those fabulous websites with hours of downloading fun.  By joining this year, I was able to obtain thematic units on a variety of science and social studies topics – everything from landforms to the Revolutionary War to a biography of Thomas Edison.  The text isn’t at most of my students’ levels, but it can be read aloud in most cases and provides an alternative or supplement  to the even harder social studies textbooks.   Each thematic unit has a fun activity booklet from which you can pull things for kids to do.

School Express also has e-workbooks with  very low level math and literacy learning opportunities.  I’ve gotten series of booklets to use in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division activities, phonics materials, grammar resources, and vocabulary support.  My library of writing prompts for sentences, paragraphs, and narrative stories has been greatly enhanced.  I added to my resources for the fairy tale genre unit by downloading all of the fairy tales in booklet form that kids can read and color.  All in all, this is a terrific site, and again, they have not rewarded me in any manner and have no idea that I’m recommending them on this blog.

Awhile back I purchased a one-year membership to Reading A-Z, an online teaching resource site that has leveled booklets you can download.  I downloaded everything I could at the lowest levels, and now I have them, permanently, to use.  Initially, they became an integral part of my guided reading instruction resources, as the stories could be easily copied and then used and re-used.  Later, I realized how many of them, both fictional and expository, can be used in conjunction with science and social studies instruction.  For example:

• The story about a salmon became part of the bin on Indians of the Pacific Northwest as well as the Rivers Habitat unit bin.
• Booklets about pond life include, at level A, “Pond Animals”, level B, “Pond Life”, Level D, “The Busy Pond”, and Level I, “Life at the Pond”.

Reading A-Z costs a little more than the other sites, but it provides enough materials make it worth the cost in many cases.  If you can get your school to reimburse you, more’s the better.  (And yet again, they have not compensated me in any way for this mention.)

accessing grade-level · accommodations · grade-level standards · lesson planning · modifications · resources · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · science · social studies · sorting cards · special education · teaching strategies

By Sara Finegan

Having special needs in the classroom doesn’t mean that you lack the ability to learn; it means that you learn differently.   It’s not about how smart a child is; it’s about how he or she is smart.

For years, educators and parents believed that students with cognitive impairments and other moderate-severe disabilities were not well-served by inclusion in general education classes.  It was a natural extension of this philosophy to decide that these children also couldn’t follow the general education curriculum.    At first glance, this makes sense; it is only when one pauses to look more carefully that one sees the distortions.

It’s certainly true that a child with cognitive impairments, who can’t read independently cannot read the science textbook and keep a science notebook like his or her gen ed peers.   There’s no doubt that a child who has limited verbal capacity can’t write a five-paragraph essay about the Sioux Indians, or read and understand the Mayflower Compact.

But that doesn’t mean that the kids aren’t able to learn about and demonstrate their understanding of Native American daily life or the Pilgrims’ ordeal in the New World.   You don’t have to be able to read to access text.  You don’t have to be able to write to show what you know.

This year my class had the gift of accepting a fourth grader with autism and mild cognitive impairment into our five-six combo class.  Jack (name changed to protect the fabulous and amazing) had no  choice but to learn about Ancient Greece and Rome with us.  To be sure, he couldn’t use the text book the way the others could, and he didn’t have the ability to make connections between the Greek and Roman forms of government and the current U.S. political system.

• But he could, and did, read fables and do a report on them.  He could, and did, handle the tallying of votes as we explored democracy.
• He could, and did, learn all about the different Greek gods and goddesses and served as the go-to expert when we played Jeopardy!
• He could, and did,  learn 25 vocabulary words related to the units of study.
• He could, and did, create a power point presentation about Harry Potter (ok, not related to social studies or science, but still!)

There’s an ongoing debate, albeit a quiet one, about whether someone like Jack really would be better off learning about Ancient History when he might be, instead, learning independent living skills and the kind of reading and writing he will have to do as an adult.   I confess that I don’t know.  What I do know is that I have never been able to determine what a child’s capacity actually is, and thus have not been privy to knowing what he or she will be able to do as an adult.    Jack came to me unable to do anything independently and very averse to trying difficult things.  By the end of the year, he was actively engaged with other kids in the class, participating in all of our lessons, and doing things nobody had thought he could.

All it took, besides my amazing aide Tamara, was a little planning time.  OK, a lot of planning time.

And there’s the rub: preparing materials and activities for kids with moderate-severe disabilities to access the gen ed curriculum is extremely time-consuming.   As far as I know, there aren’t pre-built units available on the market to use; you must be creative and innovative.

This kind of instruction can be provided in both special ed and general ed classrooms.  If you are designing it for a general ed classroom then it also has to be structured around the gen ed teacher’s time-frame, teaching style and structure, and areas of emphasis.   I suppose you can develop a generic set of tasks and materials, but if we’re serious about teaching every child at his or her level, then we need to provide our kids with special needs with work that makes sense.

And once you’ve created a resource bank to use, you can’t stop there.  You must constantly be building upon it, adding to it, revising, and customizing it to fit the needs of each child.

The task may seem daunting.  For some, it may appear to be an impossible responsibility.   But I think that, if we understand the proper methodology to use, we can, slowly but surely, create for our students and our gen ed colleagues a workable system that allows all of us to engage in the job of teaching in new and exciting ways.

autism · general education · Inclusion · learning styles · lesson planning · modifications · multiple intelligences · Sara Finegan · science · social studies · special education · teaching strategies · unit planning

By Sara Finegan

I’ve spent my free time during the last month preparing learning activities for students along a wide spectrum of disabilities in third, fourth and fifth grade science and social studies.

I had a lot of free time, as I had not one, but two student teachers, who basically took over my classroom.  The job of a master teacher like me is to monitor and support, and since my tendency is to want to jump in a lot, I keep myself from doing so by working on related tasks.  More about the tasks I chose later.

Two things have rocked my world as a teacher this spring:

1. My school has lost one special education position, and despite my rather extensive years at the district, I’m junior in seniority at my school, so I get to go.
2. My school administrator has opted to take our school three giant steps in the direction of full inclusion by eliminating our Special Day Classes, so all of our kiddos are now going to be mainstreamed next year.

I’ve had several months to adjust to the fact that I am going to be at another school next year and to organize and sort my “stuff” preparatory to packing.  I’ve also had several months to listen to my general ed colleagues, hear the worry in their voices as they wonder how to accommodate kids with profound learning disabilities in their classrooms with less special education support, and to decide what to do about that.

What I’ve done is to create unit-by-unit resource bins and binders for our third, fourth and fifth grade science and social studies classes that contain activities and learning materials from the very lowest, pre-K level up to the third-grade level.    Gen ed and special ed staff can easily pull what they need to support everyone from the barely-verbal fifth grader with a four-year-old intellect to the fourth grader with autism and hyperactivity who becomes overwhelmed by words and activity around him.

The first thing I did was to look at the grade-level standards and pull strands that I thought kids at every level could access.  I delved into my own resource bank and our school’s book room and pulled books at every level that related in some way to each of the standards.   I located materials on the internet that pertain to the standards and downloaded them.  And what I couldn’t find, I wrote myself.

At the end of the my final day at the school, I had created boxes of books, sorting cards, stories, readers theater scripts, and art projects for each of the science and social studies units.    Each box has a binder containing a variety of materials and lesson ideas, plus coloring pages and other things for kids to do with support or on their own.

My hope is that the easily-accessible materials will allow kids to stay in the gen ed classroom with modified assignments and materials instead of becoming so frustrated that they need to leave.  My other hope is that my gen ed colleagues will have less stress as they begin this new phase of inclusion and that they will see, as they implement the lessons and pull activities and books to use, how they can continue the planning and gathering work in future years.

In the next few posts on The Demanding Classroom, I will talk about the work involved in preparing for inclusion and the tasks that gen ed and special ed staff face as we support all of our kids to learn grade level, standards-based curriculum.

general education · grade-level standards · Inclusion · lesson planning · modifications · readers theater · Sara Finegan · science · social studies · sorting cards · special day class · special education · standards · supports

By Sara Finegan

         I’m a big fan of homework, but it has to be meaningful homework, and it has to be customized to fit your learners and their current skill levels.  Here are my thoughts about designing home practice in a demanding classroom:

It must be purposeful.

         Homework for the sake of homework is detrimental to a struggling learner. Kids aren’t stupid, and they know on some level, no matter how old they are, if you are just making work for them because you think that’s what teachers are supposed to do.

         The purpose of homework in a demanding classroom is to:  

• give the child additional practice in a newly-learned concept or skill and
• to provide a structure for a task they should be doing on a regular basis.

         When it comes to additional practice, a demanding classroom teacher designs a set of practice problems or questions that address what was worked on that day in class.  Examples might be: 5-10 addition problems; a set of similar word problems that require the child to set up an equation; comprehension questions that pertain to one or two plot features; practice making inferences based on short pieces of text.

         There are some excellent workbooks available in stores and online that provide practice problems in many content areas.  There are also some awful ones.  I remember a child I worked with in an after-school program who had a reading homework packet that was obviously written in the 1960’s: it was dry, pedantic, and completely uninteresting to me and the student.

A goal should be to establish a sense of competence.

         I do not want my students to have their parents do their homework, spend hours with their child struggling to get it done, or to leave the kitchen table feeling utterly drained and unskilled.

         I want my students to leave the homework table feeling like they get it, or are on the way to getting it. I want them to feel able.  Now this is not going to happen all the time, particularly when we’re learning new skill sets.

But if, over time, the student is confident that in general, he or she is going to be able to master the skills, or retain the information, or do the task fairly well, most kids will be willing to struggle a bit from time to time at home.

A homework routine should create study habits.

         Almost every school urges children to read for 30 minutes or more per day at home.  Thirty minutes is a lot for a child who has little reading stamina, or who struggles mightily with decoding or comprehension. This kind of assignment, without any other components, isn’t going to help a child with learning disabilities as much as it could with a few modifications.

         If a child is not able to read for 30 minutes in class without losing focus or melting down, do not require it at home.  Build stamina slowly.  A student who can only read for three minutes should be given a 3-5 minute reading assignment for home, followed by a book on tape or a story a parent is willing to read out loud. (Reading homework is not always just about reading skill, but also about our relationship to text and how we think about stories – books on CD, tape or read aloud can do just fine.)

         At a certain age and stage, kids can be taught how to write a reading response.  This is an extremely important skill and needs to be built in layers, slowly, with lots of practice.  The practice can be done at home, provided that you give the child examples to follow or a formula to use in the initial practice stages.  In early grades, a reading response can be an illustration with two or three sentences about a character or your opinion about the book.

          My fifth and sixth graders are currently, in the fall of the year, writing three-paragraph responses: a summary of what they read; a description of a character or the problem; a connection that they are making to the story or to a character.  By the end of the year I hope they will be doing deeper thinking and writing, but we are taking it one step at a time. Right now, their daily reading homework includes writing the response (yes, daily, though at least one child dictates to his grandmother because the act of writing is driving him crazy) because I want it to become an automatic habit for them in preparation for middle school.

As much as possible, coordinate, communicate, and negotiate with your partners: the parents.

         We don’t want parents doing the homework, but we want them to support it.  Nobody knows a child better than his or her parents, and we need to be responsive to them with regard to the work we send home.

          Right now, I have a couple of students who have major difficulties with attention.  One of them has autism and ADHD; the other has ADHD.  Both of them have parents who are excellent about notifying me when homework is just too much.  In these kinds of cases, we need to make accommodations and reduce the amount of homework in one or more ways.

• We might limit the number of problems to solve on a math set, or require less reading.
• We might change the type of work to be done.  Multiple choice or short-answer, fill-in-the-blank homework works better for these kids than other kinds of comprehension or social studies assignments.
•  We might change the way the homework needs to be done.  Both of my students are allowed to dictate their reading responses to a parent or grandparent, because getting them to sit down and write after school, when meds are wearing off and the brain is tired is not going to be a pleasant experience.
• We might give choices.  One of my students, who has moderately-functioning autism, fought homework at home for a long time.  When he came to my classroom, I provided three to four tasks to be done at home – and instructed him to pick two.  This gives him the power over the work, not me over him, and has made him voluntarily do his homework, without difficulty, when he gets home.

A goal should be to build internal drive and the self-discipline to get the practice done.

         I don’t want my students’ parents to spend hours fighting with their kids to get work done.  I also don’t want students neglecting their home practice.  Home practice needs to become a routine, a habit.

          In a demanding classroom, this is done with incentives as well as consequences.

          An immediate, automatic, small reward needs to be given to kids with learning disabilities when they turn in their homework.  As homework is checked in, kids can receive a sticker, a punch on “daily work index card”, a raffle ticket (dollar store prizes at a drawing once a week or every two weeks) or some other desired privilege.  It should be automatic and not served with effusive praise unless the child has a history of not turning in homework, in which case positive comments are a good re-enforcement.

         If you have other students check in homework, kids will be far more invested in getting it done. It’s hard to face a teacher or aide and explain why homework was not done, but for some reason it’s even harder to face your peers when all of them have been working hard.  This can be especially true if there’s a class-wide reward for 100% homework turned in, a ploy I use every now and then ($5 pizzas from Little Caesars work every time).  In general, the incentives should be small and cheap.

         Consequences are more complicated.The traditional “you miss recess” consequence is not a good idea in most special education classrooms, where kids need to get outside and move around as a kinesthetic break from the intellectual activity you’re piling on.

         I’ve been experimenting with a form letter that goes home, filled out by the student, for parents to read and sign.  It’s on bright orange paper, and can’t be missed by anyone coming even close to a backpack, and it requires the student to acknowledge work that wasn’t done and ask for help creating a plan to do it.  I keep all of them in my students’ portfolio folders, and it’s a great visual – neon orange is eye-catching.

         Restriction of free time until the homework is made up is a pretty good consequence, though again, many students, particularly those with autism or who have sensory issues need to have some minutes of free time between tasks in order to keep their minds working well.

         I’m inclined to use restriction from weekly class-wide fun activities as a consequence for not doing homework.  If the last ½ hour of class on Friday is reserved for cupcakes or a great game, kids who didn’t do homework during the week can sit in another classroom or in the office to make up their work.

         The combination of incentives and meaningful but not devastating consequences in a demanding classroom helps students learn good work habits at home and in school.

accommodations · ADHD · assignments · attention deficits · autism · consequences · demanding classroom · high expectations · home practice · homework · incentives · learning disabled · modifications · parents · purpose · reading response · reading stamina · restrictions · rewards · rigor · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · special education · standards