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!

Testing Accommodations for the Primary Classroom

Even though I teach special education students in a resource classroom, I am still expected to teach the general education curriculum and give the assessments that accompany the district-mandated curriculum.

My students do have accommodations listed on their IEPs for testing, but I want to give them as much support as possible to help them succeed. These are some of the tips I use in my classroom that have really helped my students show mastery on grade level assessments.

My number one tip is to staple your tests like a book, not in one top corner. I know this is a little more time consuming on your part but so worth it. Flipping pages over, especially on double-sided copies, can be so confusing for struggling students. 

For our math workbook pages, I am very explicit in my instructions, such as "open, flip over, look for the picture of the blue bird" or whatever is on the page. This helps make sure we're all on the right page.

Our reading tests, have an oral portion where students have to listen to my directions. Unfortunately, this part of the test is in the middle. Strange place to put it if you ask me. I always have my students turn to this page and do this portion first.

After we have done the oral and grammar portion, we turn back to the story. Even though my students have accommodations, I cannot read the story to them. After all, it is a test of reading and not a test of listening comprehension. 

I always go through the test first and figure out which portion of the text refers to which questions. On this test, question numbers 1 and 2 come from the first page of the story. I tell my students to read the first page and raise their hand. That way my faster readers aren't waiting on my slower readers, and my slower readers aren't rushed.

Once students read the first section of the text, I have them turn and answer just the questions that pertain to this section. This is huge in helping my students answer comprehension questions successfully. By breaking up the text, my students don't feel so overwhelmed.

I tell my students to raise their hands after they have answered questions numbers 1 and 2. 

 Then I turn the student's page back to the next section of the text that they need to read and repeat the process all over.

The downfall to testing this way is that I do A LOT of walking around from student-to-student. If I wore a Fitbit, I know I'd have way more than 10,000 steps on testing days. But I will say the effort on my part is worth it to see my students succeed on grade level assessments.

How do you accommodate students on testing days in your classroom?

Touch Spelling

Do you have students that struggle with spelling? Spelling is an area all of my students struggle with in their writing.

When students are "touch spelling" I always have them hold their pencil in their dominant hand and use their other hand to touch spell. Students will say the word slowly and touch one finger for each sound they say. After the student says each sound, they can then write the word.

Touch spelling has been HUGE in helping my students write down all the sounds they hear in a word. This is especially helpful with blends. As I watch my students touch spell, I can pinpoint where they are not hearing the sound, such as the 'l' in the word sled. 

If a student has written the word wrong, I will touch spell directly over the word they have written. This helps them easier see if the sound matches up to the word that they've written.

If a student doesn't know how to spell a word, my go to response is always say the sounds and touch spell. I rarely spell a word for a student since I want to encourage them to write independently.

Here are some other activities I use to help students understand the spelling of words and how to manipulate sounds.

Building words is an activity that I use frequently in my classroom. I try to fit this in weekly. It's great for my students to practice listening to sounds, manipulating sounds, and making sure they understand phonics patterns in a hands-on way. You can check this activity out more by clicking {here} or the picture below.

I use this Making Words activity with my students who have stronger writing skills and have a larger base of spelling/phonics patterns and known words.

There are 4 different themed words for each month of the school year. Students cut out the letter tiles and try to make as many words as they can. They love trying to figure out who can find the mystery word first. You can see more about this activity by clicking {here} or the picture below.

I hope these tips are helpful in your classroom!

100 Days of School

This week, we celebrated the 100th day of school. Since I have a resource room, I don't have a lot of time to do extra things due to my crazy schedule. But I am so glad I made time to do this super fun activity with my students.

We started off discussing what we will look like and act like when we are 100 years old. I took pictures of my students and used the app Aging Booth to "time travel" to our picture when we were 100 years old.

My kids were laughing so hard at these pictures.

We talked about what our lives would be like when we were 100 years old and what kind of person we thought we would be. Fall Into First has a great writing activity that we did. I gave my students the same writing template to help them make grammatically correct sentences (a huge project in my room).

This is probably my favorite bulletin board of the whole year.

We've been working really hard on reading what we write and fluency. To help tie this project into this two objectives, I used another app on Day 2 called ChatterPix.

With ChatterPix, you can upload any photo and record voice to it. By drawing a simple line on the photo, you make a "mouth" that speaks your recording.

On ChatterPix, you can only record 30 seconds of video. This was super great for me, because my students need to practice their fluency. We did a practice run reading our writing while I timed with my stopwatch timer on my phone. I wouldn't let students attempt recording until they could read their writing in less than 30 seconds. 

Here's one of my favorite videos that totally cracked me up!

After we made our videos, we uploaded them to our online portfolios at SeeSaw.

My parents always leave the sweetest comments to our SeeSaw uploads.

This 100 Day of School activity will be a favorite every year now! It was totally worth the effort, and we have laughed so much the last two days.

Helping B and D Reversals (freebie included)

B and D reversals are something I see often in my students reading and writing. 

I've posted before {here} about some of the errors that I often see in struggling readers and how I correct the errors while reading {here}.

Today, I'm sharing with you some of the activities that I use to help students practice differentiating between the letters B and D. Sometimes it seems like my students really just need so much practice and lots of visual cues to help them out. 

I like to give my students consistency with how I describe the formation of B and D. I always use the sayings "bat before the ball" for B and "doughnut on a stick" for D. This helps my students remember what part of the letter they need to form first.

I keep some of these types of activities handy all the time. I can easily pull them out whenever we have a few extra minutes or if I just think my students need some more discrimination practice between the two letters.

 You can check these activities out by clicking on the picture below or {here}.

One of my students favorite games is this B and D Zap! game that's a freebie in my store.

We play this game as a "speed" game. I set my timer for 3 minutes and students must quickly say the correct letter to keep a card. We try to do as many as we can in 3 minutes. There are special cards that students can pull, such as the Zap! card. The Zap! card means students must give all of their cards back to me. There is also a skip and reverse card to keep the game fun. My students love playing Zap!

You can check it out by clicking on the picture below or {here}.

 I hope this gives you some helpful ideas for your students!

How I'm Supplementing Reading Wonders Unit 3

Now that we're back from Christmas break, we've started Unit 3 in the 1st grade Reading Wonders series. Our district requires us to use this curriculum and expects us to follow the pacing and assessments from Reading Wonders. Even though I teach special education, I am still expected to teach grade level material and use our curriculum. Although, I do go at slower pace than my gen ed counterparts.

There are things I like about the series (such as the readers and decodables from WonderWorks), but there are areas that I feel like Reading Wonders doesn't do a great job with. The practice pages are very boring and dry, but my students really need the practice!

Here are some of the materials I will use to supplement Unit 3.

At the beginning of each unit, I pull out all of the high frequency word cards for our word wall.

I love how our Word Wall is color coordinated.  This makes it easy to tell students to look for the pink card under Oo to find the word of. When students are helping their friends find words, they know to tell them what color card they should look for.

Each word card is labeled with the Unit and Week to make for easier storage and organizing. You can check them out {here} or by clicking below.

Every morning, we start our day with Corinna from Surfin' Through Second's morning work. I love how the repetition gives my students a sense of independent but also allows them practice valuable skills.

For morning work, I use the pages that are several pages behind where we are in the series. This way I know the students have been taught the skill already, and it gives them a spiral review of previously taught skills. Here's a sample page of what my students were working on before Christmas break.

You can check out Corinna's morning work by clicking {here} or the picture below.

My students love playing games! They are so excited about playing games that they don't even care that they're learning. I've made games that go along with each phonics skills and a comprehensive unit game of the high frequency sight words taught.

I use these games during small group, with my RTI intervention groups from the gen ed classrooms, as a way to reengage students when I see them slipping, or just as a quick time filler.

My students are so excited to see what the special cards are for each game. This little guy had to find out the special cards even though they weren't cut out yet!

Every game comes with a recording sheet for students to get extra practice.

You can check out the games for Unit 3 more by clicking {here} or on the picture below.

My students need a lot of practice with the weekly Wonders skills, but I also need it to be easy for me. I created these Print It! Practice It! pages to help my students AND me! I use these with the students in my classroom and the RTI students that I see from the gen ed classrooms. 

My students will do anything to use a spinner or roll dice! When students play, I typically put them in partners. Their partner is required to listen to their friend read and double check that they correctly read the word or sentence. I keep an eye on all my partners, record errors or growth as they read to each other, and help out when students have trouble decoding words.

Putting the pages in page protectors makes it easy for me to pull them out of a binder and have an easy activity ready to go at a moments notice.

Each week includes several pages of practice for decoding the weekly phonics skill, editing sentences, and practicing the grammar skills.

These are some of the pages we will be using in upcoming weeks.

Unit 3 Week 3's phonics skills focuses on the Soft C and Soft G patterns. I love the Spin It! Read It! pages that include reading phonics patterns in a sentence. 

I've really been working hard to make sure my students understand the different phonics rules that go with each pattern. I've made a point to describe the pattern and refer to the pattern and rules during our everyday talk. I love when I hear them stating the rules to each other.

Contractions are so much more fun if they can roll a dice while they're practicing!

Adding inflectional endings are so tricky! This is just the kind of practice my students need!

You can see more of the pages included in this unit by downloading the preview file that can be found {here} or by clicking the picture below.

There you have it! All this practice should really help push my students toward mastery of the skills in Unit 3!

Encouraging Quality Student Work

Some of my students really struggle with completing acceptable, quality work. We do a lot of do-overs and erasing in my room! Since we're coming back from Christmas break, I wanted us to start off reviewing the expectations of quality work by providing some visuals to help us out.

We also filled out this reflection sheet as a way to really think about whether or work is considered quality work or not.

I'll be adding these reflection sheets to my students' individual Student Data Notebooks as a reminder of what they will need to do in order to complete quality work.

For some of my students that need a more consistent visual reminder, I taped these Quality Work strips to their desks.

If these can be useful in your classroom, you can download them {here} as a freebie.