March Madness

A good day for me is when I only feel about three steps behind where I'd like to be.  It is the nature of special education and I love the constant activity.  I wouldn't change it for the world.  Every day is different and I always have new things jumping on my to do list.  In my opinion, this is truly the best time to be a teacher because of the unlimited resources we have available to us at our fingertips.  

I have recently taken on three different math intervention groups (first, second, and third grade).  What this means is that I need to very quickly whip up programs materials that my instructional aides and I can follow.  Lucky for me, Teachers Pay Teachers has a million wonderful games and units to choose from.  I did some browsing and found some winners that have gone over well with my groups and I thought I would pass them along.  

To start, Second Story Window, has these spectacular homework add-on packs.  These are common core aligned, which is always a plus for me.  I ended up printing these out and making them into packets for my aide to work on in a small group.  There is just enough content in each page to cover my 30 minutes with them and there are a lot of learning opportunities embedded in the content.  

For my third grade group, I went over to In The Math Lab and I found this seasonal packet of math activities for the month of March.  They have several different packets for each month of the year so take your pick!  These are meant to be daily activities, but with my group meeting only once a week I can stretch them out a little longer.  

With conferences, report cards, progress reports, and evaluations looming it feels great to have these tasks checked off my to-do list!

Spring Cleaning

It's typically about this time of year that I start thinking about next year.  I start dreaming of how I want to rearrange my room and how I want to change my decorations.  I think it's because we are approaching the homestretch as far as the year goes.  It's there...I can see it just on the horizon.  We have a lot of changes going on at our school next year and I am so excited to revamp my room.  It's also this time of year that we special-education teachers can begin to feel as though we are hitting a wall.  

Even though we do evaluations all year long, the window between November and March tends to be the most packed for me.  Between back to back IEPs and benchmark assessments, we can begin to go a little nutty and feel as though we are losing control.  

I found myself browsing through motivational/inspirational posters during my break and I thought that next year I wanted to incorporate them into my decor.  And then the thought came to me, "Why not now?"

I decided that I could kill two birds with one stone by whipping up some posters and a banner for my room this weekend.  I'm happy to say that my room now has a fresh vibe and some new positivity spread throughout.  While the goal is that the words will be inspiring for my students, I know that they will be inspiring for the adults in the room as well.  

We all need inspiration from time to time which is why I put up the 8/5x11 posters for free in my TPT store.  I was able to find the quotes online by doing a google search for "inspirational educational quotes".  There were a MILLION great ones, but I limited it to four for now.  

On my way in to work today I stopped by the dollar store to pick up some frames to display them and, of course, the dollar store didn't disappoint.  These "Certificate of Achievement" frames are the perfect size for the 8.5x11 posters.
  

The Finished Product!

My favorite quote I found is by Margaret Fuller:

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader"

This quote was screaming to me, "Make me into a banner!"  It was super easy to assemble and it looks amazing!  This one is for sale in my TPT store.

1) Lay flags face-up on top of backing to ensure that they are in the correct order.
2) Flip them over one at a time and tape the backing to the flag.
3) Continue down the line, making sure that they are evenly spaced apart.

Now it's time for me to take a deep breath and jump back in it tomorrow!!!

Present Levels Remix

When I was going to school to be a special education teacher, I was told over and over again, "Get ready for all the data!"

I knew that there was a lot of data collection, I figured it couldn't be that hard.  What I was not prepared for was the task of keeping data for 15+ students across four grade levels on a regular basis...HELP!  

My classroom services students with mild-moderate learning disabilities.  This means that the majority of my students spend most of their time in their general education classroom.  This makes it very difficult for me come IEP time to get a good understanding of where they are at with their present levels.  It also doesn't help that each teacher has a different style of working and collecting student info.  It would be great if each of them had a nice little binder waiting for me with student work so that I could dive in and get what I need.  That's very rarely the case.  We all have our own organizational styles and that's fine with me.  

What I've done to tackle this issue is I've typed up a present levels form that I can fill out when I meet with the general education teacher prior to the IEP.  It helps to give our conference a direction and to work efficiently.  To expedite the process I went through each of the standards and notated a reference in the measure section to the curriculum so that we have a starting off point for each standard.

One thing that I never quite developed is that beautiful teacher handwriting.  My penmanship skills peaked in the fourth grade.  For that reason, I like to bring my laptop to meet with the teachers, type directly in the document, and print it out when I'm done.  If you have beautiful handwriting, I'm jealous...you can just print it out and fill it out by hand as you go.


See my mini-tutoral to find out how to add your curriculum reference points to your document.

Below are some samples of my third grade PLOP packet. There is a peek at the blank document and a shot of what my document that I use looks like. Of course, it's up in my TPT store, stop by and check it out!

 
  

First

First thing's first.  I love my job!  No really, I love, love, love my job!  I'm an elementary-age special education teacher and I'm lucky enough to get up every day and go to a job that's exciting, inspiring, and more importantly...fun!  That being said, it's not always a walk in the park. Teaching is hard work.  Teaching special education is hard work.  Teaching special education in the midst of a major changeover of curriculum and instruction methodologies is hard work.  There are many times that we, as special-educators, get bogged down with the paperwork, the data, the meetings, the trainings, the paperwork...did I mention the paperwork?  With all these responsibilities it's very easy to lose sight of how fun it is to work with kids every day.  My goal here is to help other fellow teachers to find their way in the common core.  It's my hope that by doing this we can all work more efficiently and productively so that we can have more time to focus on why we got into teaching in the first place...the kids!