Author: TCR Staff

Teaching Tips

Working with Students with Special Needs: Part II – Adjusting Your Teaching

1 Comment

It’s been estimated that 20% of students have one or more developmental, learning, or behavioral disorders. It is important, therefore, to adjust your teaching practice to suit the specials needs of your students in the classroom. Here are some tips to consider as you do this:

How do I get them started?
Let these students know when you are starting and how long they will probably take to do the task. If possible, stay with them until they finish that initial stage of “I can’t do this” or “Why do I have to do this—it’s stupid.” If the whole thing is daunting for them, break it into small parts.

How do I get them to stay on task?
Clear away as many distractions as possible. Be sure to clean off the desk. Sometimes a student like this actually performs better with a rubber ball to hold. Their tension goes directly into that object. Keep telling the student what a nice job he or she is doing.

How do I get them to stay in their seats?
Make sure your student knows what you expect. This type of child may feel a great need to get up and walk around for a little while. Use this as a reward after a set amount of time following directions. Keep them away from areas of distraction like the door, pencil sharpener, or drinking fountain.

How do I get them to follow directions?
This child doesn’t understand or register subtle hints. You must be direct and clear in as few words as possible. Have the child repeat and explain what he or she is supposed to do. You may also have to go so far as to role-play the direction.

For more tips on working with students with special needs, check out Chapter 3: Working With Special Populations in the Substitute Teacher Handbook.

Teaching Tips

Working with Students with Special Needs: Part I – What Research Says

1 Comment

Introduction
Here is another series we will be featuring in the next several posts. It’s about working with students with special needs. Educators looking for information on this topic may find this series particularly useful. The information we will provide may also be helpful for substitute teachers to know as it relates to handling unfamiliar students and situations that the substitute teacher is likely to face during his or her career.

In the next few posts, you will find information concerning children with special needs such as:

  • Special-Education Students
  • Children with ADHD (Attention Deficient Hypertension Disorder)
  • High-Achieving Students
  • Students from Other Cultures

As you read this series, you might have additional questions. It’s important that you investigate your district’s policies concerning any additional questions you may have.

What Research Says About Working with Students with Special Needs

Research shows that these things Will Help low-academic-level students achieve basic skills:

  • Time spent in structured learning activities led by the teacher.
  • Breaking down the instruction into small, sequenced activities.
  • Plenty of repetition with frequent correction and praise.
  • Lots of supervision and help.
  • Materials or questions at the student’s success level.
  • Many opportunities and much encouragement to succeed.
  • Mostly narrow teacher questions with one “right” answer.
  • Calling on non-volunteers or using patterned turns to select students to answer questions.
  • Immediate feedback (as right or wrong) to students’ answers.

Research shows that these things Will Not Help low-academic-level students achieve basic skills:

  • Time spent in unstructured or free time.
  • Long unbroken periods of seat work with student choice of activities.
  • Little practice or independent practice with prompt feedback.
  • Individualized, self-paced instruction and independent work.
  • Challenging work in which student will not know most of the answers.
  • Few opportunities or little encouragement to answer correctly.
  • Mostly open-ended questions.
  • Non-academic conversation.
  • Selecting only volunteers when calling on students to answer questions.
  • Not giving clear feedback to students’ answers.

Stay tuned for more tips on how to work with students with special needs. Please leave any questions or thoughts you have in our comment section.

Lesson Plans

Earth Day Activities

Comment

A little background…

Earth Day was first held in the United States on April 22, 1970, and was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson. The second Earth Day, held on April 22, 1990, was celebrated in over 140 countries. Earth Day is a day to remind us of the need to care for our environment.

Another related holiday held nationally in the United States on the last Friday of April is Arbor Day, a day to plant new trees and emphasize conservation. It was first held in Nebraska on April 10, 1872, and its founder was conservation advocate Julius Sterling Morton. The date for Arbor Day may vary depending on the state in which you live.

Earth Day Activities

Start a school-wide recycling program. Collect aluminum cans, plastic bottles, paper, and glass. Put collection points around the school. If possible, have a curbside drop-off point one day a week so the public can support your efforts. Recruit some adults to help with transportation to a recycling center. This may be coordinated by your class or by your school’s student government. Decide on a worthwhile organization that helps the earth and contribute the money you earn to it.

Create a bulletin board entitled “Our Dreams for Our Environment.” Divide the board into halves labeled “good dreams” and “bad dreams.” On the good side, put paintings or drawings which represent a clean, safe environment. On the bad side, put illustrations to represent what will happen to the environment if we don’t take better care of the earth.

Another idea for a bulletin board… Use the classified section of the newspaper as the background for this bulletin board. Title the board “The Daily Planet.” Throughout the unit, have students bring in and post articles from newspapers or magazines that tell about environmental problems that the world is facing.

More bulletin board ideas… If you don’t have time to create a bulletin board yourself, check out the Green Earth Bulletin Board from Susan Winget.

Discuss how the air can be cleaned up.

Have students design a mode of transportation that would not pollute the air.

Make a class weather station, including a wind sock, wind vane, anemometer, and rain gauge. Students can make instruments individually or in teams. Then hold an Air, Wind, and Weather Open House to share the products of the unit. Invite the school principal, parents, another class, and/or others.

Have your students design posters for Earth Day. They can be displayed in the classroom, in the library, throughout the school, and in the community.

Hold an Earth Day bookmark contest. Have your class make up the contest rules and forms. Select a winner from each grade level. Duplicate the bookmarks of the winners and distribute them to the students at your school. See if your public library will duplicate and distribute them, too.

Set up an art center where students create art work from recyclable material including anything that they can use in a way different from the way it was originally used. This might include old buttons, fabric scraps, or lace trim as well as more typical “trash.”

Make seed pictures. Draw simple shapes onto small pieces of colored tagboard. Glue a variety of seeds onto the shapes.

Create fruit and vegetable mobiles. Have students identify a grouping (e.g., vegetables that are seeds or fruits with pits) and draw, color, and cut out representative examples. Attach these to the bottoms of coat hangers with string or yarn. Mount the title from the top of the hanger.

Learn about careers related to plants. Be sure to include nursery workers, landscape architects, gardeners, farmers, horticulturists, arborists, and botanists. Have students interview nursery workers or research the occupations and present their findings to the class. Invite some of these workers to school as guest speakers or take field trips to visit places of work.

Assess students’ knowledge of environmental issues by completing a word web using the word “pollution” or “environment.” Discuss the different types of pollution that exist in the world, especially any problems that are prevalent in your own community.

Students can write letters to city officials, senators, representatives, and even the president, urging them to pass laws which protect the environment. Have them include some of their concerns and ideas for possible solutions.

Hand out awards to students who demonstrate good knowledge and practice of environmental sustainability. Click here to print out a sample SAVE OUR EARTH AWARD.

Be sure to subscribe to The TCR Update to get more free e-books and other special offers every month.

Behavior Management

Need Your Students Quiet and On-Task? Try Secret Workers.

3 Comments

Need a new strategy to get your students to stay quiet and focus on their work? Try Secret Workers. Secretly pick two people and write their names down. Announce to the class that the teacher has picked two Secret Workers. If the two Secret Workers are quiet, follow the directions, and stay on task, they will earn a reward for the entire class. If the two do not behave properly, the class will not receive the reward. Since no one knows who the Secret Workers are, everyone is forced to behave as the teacher has asked. This behavior system works well for shorter lengths of time—about half-hour to 40-minute time frames.

Rewards can be anything the teacher chooses, such as five extra minutes of recess, free time, stickers, etc. Extra recess is a logical reward. The teacher can always say, “Since you used the class time so well and stayed on task, we will have extra time to get in more recess.” Or the teacher might say, “Since you have worked so hard, you have earned an extra five minutes of break time.”

There can be variations to the Secret Workers. One variation is to tell the class that the teacher will be picking one boy and one girl. Another variation is to divide the class in half, and tell the class that one person will be picked from the left side of the room and one from the right side. After using this technique several times, the teacher can then have a competition between the two groups.

Tips: If the Secret Workers are successful, be sure to announce their names and have the class thank them. If the Secret Workers are unsuccessful, talk to them personally and do not reveal the names to the class.

It is a good idea to announce aloud how the Secret Workers are doing. For example, a teacher might say, “Wow, the Secret Workers are doing really well” or “Uh-oh, our Secret Workers need to be careful.”