Special Education Featured Teacher {April}

I would like to welcome Caitlin from Learning Ahoy! as my Special Education Featured Teacher for the month of April!  I know you are going to love her post about adapted books and how you can make your own.  She also is sharing something special with us all!  Thanks, Caitlin!!

Hello everyone!  My name is Caitlin and I am the author of the blog Learning Ahoy!!  I have been teaching special education for 10 years and have taught kiddos ages 2 – 12.   I have been married to my husband for almost 8 years and I am mom to 3 little boys (although they are going really fast).   My passion is the students who need the most help.  The ones who do not have a traditional communication system, who have medical needs, who may need help learning to navigate in their wheel chair and everything else that comes naturally to so many. 

In trying to help my students learn (and be engaged in what they are learning) I have found that the more hands on I make something, the better they grasp it.  For this reason, I try to make books as interactive as possible.   I do this in a number of ways. One way is,  I adapt book is by using board books (more durable) and making pictures (I usually use boardmaker) to go along with them.   I look for board books when I am at garage sales and thrift stores that was I can get them for 25¢ each (sometimes even free when I mention what I am using them for).  Once I have a stack of a few books, I sit down and make all of the pictures at once.  I go through the book and find words or pictures that I can use to help build vocabulary and keep my students engaged.  I print the pictures out and laminate using 5mil film (again, durability).  I then cut them out and use Velcro to attach them to each page.  When we read the book, I like to start by putting all of the picture on a vellum board I made and talking about what each picture is.  We then read the book and add the pictures when needed.  The Velcro on the pages are my cues that we need to add something.   This has worked great with my students this year!  They have more involved when we do read alouds and are demonstrating higher rates of comprehension.

 Another way is that I often write my own interactive books or use ones that have been written by other special education teachers.  Some examples of these are Shamrock, Shamrock, What are you hiding? (A freebie in my TpT store!) and Where is the Turkey? .  Just last weekend I wrote a book called Plants Need because I could not find anything simple enough (and still age appropriate) for my students .  I used it this week with my class and it was a hit.  My students blew me away with how they retained the information throughout the week.

Well, if you made it this far, I have a surprise for you!  I have a new interactive book that I am posting just for this guest post. And guess what?!? It is free until Saturday!  It is called “Where is themonkey?”.  I have read it with my students multiple times and the cute monkey is a huge hit.  You can get it by going to this link. 

I hope this post helped you see how to make your students more engaged in reading and learning.  I would love if you would hop on board the Learning Ahoy ship by following me on Facebook, Pinterest, TpT (lots of free stuff) and subscribing to email posts.  You can read more about the happenings in my classroom by sailing over to Learning Ahoy!!

Also I just wanted to thank Kim for having me as a guest blogger.  I love sharing and collaborating with other special education teachers.

Special Education Featured Teacher {March 2015}

I am excited to start my Special Education Featured Teacher series with one of my favorite special ed teacher/bloggers.  I hope you enjoy this amazing post from Gabrielle Dixon from Teaching Special Thinkers. 

Each month a new Special Education Teacher/Blogger will be featured on my blog on the first Thursday of each month!  Click on the Featured Teacher tab above for more information!  

Hi everyone! Gabrielle here from Teaching Special Thinkers! Today I want to share with you about my “color-coding” classroom organizational system. Although it sounds silly, assigning my students a color at the beginning of the school year is my go-to for organization. It has saved my sanity. With 3 instructional assistants, a lead teacher, and a student teacher, keeping data and student materials organized and easy to access can be quite a challenge in a busy classroom! 

With 8 students, I basically use the colors of the rainbow: red, pink, orange, yellow, light blue, dark blue, and green. I bought packs of colored paper at Office Max 2 years ago and I am STILL using the same packs – quite the bargain! Since I do not put the students' names on anything and just use their colors, I can re-use EVERYTHING each year. Oh yea, and if I have a student move and get a new student, no need to fret, they just move right in the "vacant" color. It's like magic to a busy teacher!!

Here are a few different ways I use the color-coded system in my classroom:

Adult Schedules

When I created our master zone schedule, the student colors come in handy. In our “adult” schedule,  I use time intervals and student colors to show adults where they need to be throughout the day and WHO they are working with.

Click here for more info on how I create my classroom schedule

Student Schedules

In our classroom, each student has a schedule for the day. At the beginning of the year, all of my students usually start on a picture schedule or words with pictures that are Velcroed onto a large strip in their cubbies. Their cubby, and schedule cards are both in their “color” so that it’s super easy for them to locate their schedule at the beginning of the year, AND it’s a piece of cake for the adults to reorganize all the schedule cards at the end of the day when we are redoing schedules for the next day.

Click here to read more about how I organize student schedules and the cubby area of our classroom

Data

As a special educator, DATA has become my middle name. In order to keep up with all the data collected in our classroom, I created data binders and data clipboards for each student in our classroom. The clipboards are hung in a central location in our classroom so when an adult knows they are working with a certain student, they can quickly grab their clipboard to take data. I keep all the data we collect throughout the year in the data binders, which are kept on the top of the student’s cubbies.

Click here for some freebies for your data binders!

Station Materials

In stations where each student has specific items they are working on, such as our language station, I use the color-coding system as well. In the picture before, the boxes are coded with the student’s colors, along with the binders that we use to collect data on discrete trial training and fluency of mastered skills.

Click here to see how we run our language station

Student Binders

I prepare student reading and math binders at the beginning of the year with all the “copied” workbook materials we use. For example, in a student’s reading binder, I have tabs for writing, Word’s Their Way, phonics, handwriting, etc. Of course, the student’s binders are covered with their color paper and either “reading” or “math” for easy access for the adults and the students.

A Little Bit About Me:

I am currently an autism classroom teacher of students in grades kindergarten through 2^nd grade. My passion for providing children with Autism high quality instruction as well as a safe and nurturing learning environment that fosters independence and growth has granted me the opportunity to develop my blog where I strive to empower others who support individuals with Autism and developmental disabilities. Through a desire to engage each and every learner in my own classroom, my passion for creating interactive and appropriately leveled resources has grown and developed over the past three years. My goal, through my profession as a teacher and as a member of the online teacher blogger community, is to advocate awareness and acceptance of individuals with Autism, as well as help others who work with these individuals meet their maximum potential in and out of the classroom. 

I am also a dog momma to a wonderful rescue puppy, Koda, wife to my wonderful husband of almost 3 years, AND I am a Jamberry consultant! Basically, I like to stay busy, busy!! :)

I am so excited to be featured on Kim's blog for March! Thanks so much for letting me "take over" for the day, Kim!! You're the best! <3

To contact me, you can e-mail me here!

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New!! Special Education Featured Teacher

I have been blessed to become a part of a special education blogging community.  I never thought when I started this blog back in 2011 that so many doors would be opened before me.  This may come as a surprise to some of you, but I tend to be very shy.  I know some of you are reading this and thinking, "Yeah, right!"  It's true, but writing this blog has allowed me to open up about a field of education that I feel very strongly about and has given me the courage to my chase dreams for new jobs, presenting professional development and taking on more leadership roles in my own school.

This blog has given me so many amazing opportunities!  I have reviewed apps and products, participated in blog hops, consulted with teachers across the country, and become a member of outstanding educational communities such as Learning A-Z and Social Thinking.   It has also opened doors of communication and idea sharing with parents and colleagues in my own school district. Even with all of these awesome chances to share my love and expertise in the special education community, nothing compares to the work I do day in and day out with my students.  Which is the whole reason I began this blog in the first place.  I love sharing what I have learned over the years and pushing myself to become a better special education teacher through the contacts and encouragement I have received from parents, teachers, colleagues, family and friends.

When I began blogging, there were already TONS of teacher blogs, but very few special education teacher blogs.  I remember finding my first couple of special ed blogs and being so excited that I would have someone to follow that would be sharing ideas that I could implement in my own resource classroom or share with my co-teachers.  I really and truly hope that my blog has inspired some of you.  I hope I have shared ideas from my own experiences and classroom that you can adopt and use.  I know the special ed bloggers that I follow have done that very thing for me! I have gained friendships with bloggers from across the country that I look up to and respect. It truly is like knowing a celebrity when a blogger that you have followed and sought advice from over the years becomes someone that you can readily call on, talk to (about non-school related things), and calls you by first name!  It is silly, yes, but so exciting!!

I would love to grow this special education blogging community even more by featuring a special education blogger each month in my new adventure called Special Education Featured Teacher.  I will feature a special education teacher, interventionist, school based therapist, or educational consultant once a month starting in March!  This blogger will be able to share a guest post on my blog, be featured throughout the whole month, and we will all get to learn a little more about our favorite special ed. bloggers!

If you would like to become an upcoming Featured Teacher, please click on the page above titled Featured Teachers and show your interest by completing the form.

I cannot wait to help this community grow!!  I hope you are inspired as much as I am by the amazing special education bloggers that I promise you will meet throughout the year!

~Kim