Do You Like These IEPs?

So many fun things are happening this week in schools across America. In my class, we'll be doing lots of reading rhyming books by a Dr. who cannot be mentioned due to trademark laws and a bunch of other technical stuff.

If you follow me on Instagram @extraspecialteaching you'll be able to check out these awesome 

t-shirts my team will wear on Wednesday and some other fun stuff my class will be doing.

A few years ago, I came across this poem somewhere and spruced it up some. It cracks me up every time I read it, especially since I'm drowning in IEPs right now! You can download your copy by clicking {here} or the picture below.

Happy celebrating reading week!

Starting the Year Off Right for Special Education Teachers

I can't believe my summer is over, and I'm back to work already!  

As a special education teacher, I've learned that there's so much collaboration we have to do!  We're often seeing students from several different general education classrooms (I have 6 gen ed teachers I work with so far), plus working with speech therapists, OT/PTs, behavior interventionists, etc.  So many people to work with and coordinate things!

And since there's so many people to work with, I've learned that your relationship with the gen ed teachers can make a HUGE difference.  You really want to start the year off on a positive note and start facilitating those relationships.

I know the first day you return back to work is stressful.  You need to set up your classroom, read IEPs, lesson plan, decorate bulletin boards, the list is never ending!  But I really think it's important to make contact with those gen ed teachers the 1st or 2nd day you're back to work.

I took time my first day back to work to quickly go through my IEPs and fill out these IEP SnapShots.

Then I printed off my IEP accommodation pages, Behavior Support Plans, and any other relevant information for the gen ed teachers.  

I had my list of students but I didn't have a list of which gen ed teacher they were assigned.

No big deal though, I just went class to class and asked which kids were on that teacher's classroom roster.  I gave the gen ed teacher the IEP Snapshot and other relevant papers and chatted for a quick minute about the students.  

I always try to make sure my gen ed teachers know that I'm also there to support THEM!  Sometimes it can be really intimidating for a gen ed teacher to have special education students in their classrooms.  Sometimes they've heard lots of scary things about students.  By making contact right away, I hope I can make them feel a little better and let them know that we're in this together!  

You can download this IEP Snapshot as a freebie from All that Chit by clicking on the picture below.

How do you start the year off with your gen ed teachers?

Math Progress Monitoring (freebie)

I have a small group of 3rd graders that I'm responsible for their math instruction and math grades.  We've had a huge push in our district to have ESE students (what we call special ed) receive the gen ed math instruction, curriculum and assessments.  Luckily, I'm also gen ed certified which means I can still pull my students into the resource room and teach the gen ed curriculum to them in a smaller group setting and at a better pacing for them.

My 3rd graders are getting the gen ed math curriculum with me; however, we're not going as fast as the gen ed classes.  We're 1-2 chapters behind everyone else.  I've also skipped some portions of each chapter to keep my kids going, so we can cover more between now and FCAT.  I also don't except my students to complete multi-step word problems independently.  These types of problems we do together, and I try to talk them through the steps.

For the most part, my students are learning the skills fairly well.  They all do really well on their chapter tests (same one that their peers take).  BUT I've noticed one area where they are really struggling and that is word problems.  When I give them their chapter tests, they usually score an A.  I realized they are doing so well, because they know that every problem is a division problem or whatever other operation we are covering.

Most of my math IEP goals state something like this:

When given a real world math problem, Student will choose the correct operation and solve (write) the problem correctly with 80% accuracy.

Their short term goals are typically skills they need to be able to solve these problems and usually look like this:

When given a 4-digit subtraction problem with and without regrouping, Student will solve the problem with 80% accuracy.

I realized that I needed someway to track how my students are progressing on their IEP goals and a way to see how they are doing solving word problems that don't involve the chapter tests where every problem is the same operation.

So I came up with this plan.  Once a week (usually) I give my students a 5 question "review quiz" that has different word problems requiring different operations to solve.  Now that we've learned division, I usually do a place value, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problem.  These quizzes look like this:

Not surprisingly, my students struggle with this review quiz.  I usually get a lot of 60's as a grade since my students keep thinking every problem should be solved with addition no matter how many times we've gone over different types of problems!  To help chart their progress and look for patterns, I made this chart for me and I quickly fill it in when I grade their quizzes.  Here's what a couple of mine look like:

This is the place value form.  My kids usually do ok on place value up to 4-digits.  Once we get to 5 & 6-digit numbers they get a little lost.

This is my subtraction form.  Oh my......my kids know how to subtract with regrouping.  It's not the skill of subtracting that causes them to do so poorly on the subtraction problems.  The problem is that they usually ADD instead of subtracting.  We keep going over key words, thinking about what the problem is asking, reviewing why it can't be an addition problem, but this continues to be a problem for them.  Any suggestions on how to help with this?

I don't know if these forms will help anyone else, but I've uploaded them as a freebie just in case.  Click on the picture to get your FREE copy!

I'm on spring break right now!!  Yeah!!!!!  Man, did I need a break!  I've spent today catching up on laundry and making a few things that I wanted to create for my classroom.  I've uploaded some new games to my TPT store.  Click on the pictures to check them out.

I'm really excited about this one.  My kids love Angry Birds and will LOVE this game to practice reading R-Controlled Vowels.

I know my Kindergarten & 1st grade  kiddos will love collecting these eggs as they practice their sight words.

Now I'm off to enjoy more of this spring break (and fold laundry).

Graphics by: KPM Doodles, Scrappin Doodles, JW Illustrations, and Revi Devi

IEPing

Yes, IEPing is an official verb in my household.  My husband just looked at me and asked, "Are you IEPing?"  We're so close to the end of the year but there's so still so much paperwork left to do.  I have an IEP tomorrow, 3 on Friday (not by my scheduling), 2 others that I need to sit in on to prepare for next year students, 1 that I definitely have to schedule (tomorrow's to-do list), and 1 more that I may have to schedule.  And.....there's still paperwork left from the 2 IEPs I had on Friday that MUST be finished.


Ughhhh.......I'm tired of IEPing.  Anyone else out there tired of IEP meetings?  To keep myself motivated I made this super cute bulletin board.

I saw it posted on someone's blog (I can't remember where) and fell in love.  I was pretty impressed with myself that I was able to replicate it.  This board makes me smile every morning when I rip another number off.  There's actually only 18 days of school left which makes it even better!  So hang in there everyone.....the IEPs are almost over with for this year!