Our blog has been designed to keep our educators, parents and clinicians up-to-date on trending topics in special education.
Students with moderate to severe disabilities often have communication impairments and difficulty getting their wants and needs met. Teaching language is an essential part of the job of a special educator, and yet, can be extremely complicated. For instance, think of the word “book.” While the word itself may be simple, the student has to be able to apply the word in many different contexts.
I remember my first year of teaching like it was yesterday. I was brand new to the special education field, had just accepted a role serving students with autism, and was told I would have four paraprofessionals in my classroom. While more seasoned special educators may have been thrilled to be given that kind of support, I could barely grasp managing myself and my students, and now I had four teachers that I was expected to manage, as well. While college courses teach you how to provide instruction and manage paperwork/IEPs (I even remember a course about working with families!), there was no specific guidance provided on managing a team of adults. Let’s explore how to support the invaluable staff who work with our students.
If you’ve ever sung the ABCs, done the motions to “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” or played a language-learning game on your phone, you’ve experienced multisensory learning firsthand. Chances are, you still remember some of the songs and rhymes you learned in elementary school—and that's because multisensory learning really works! Multisensory learning is an approach that incorporates various modalities and engages multiple senses. Typically, multisensory teaching strategies and activities use some combination of visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile methods.
Language is a core part of how we connect with one another, and it is at the very heart of learning. For some children, language skills don’t come as naturally as they do for others. Identifying and supporting language development early can make all the difference for children with developmental delays. Language delays can have a ripple effect, impacting everything from academic skills to friendships, making early intervention a critical step toward helping children thrive in school and in the community. In this blog, we’ll cover: key language milestones from infancy to early elementary years, how to start early intervention services and get families involved, and yhe types of intervention services available at home, school, and in the community.
Language development is the process through which students acquire the ability to communicate. In typically developing children, this process begins at around 3 months of age and continues most intensely during the first three years of life. This process begins with an infant’s cry which is when children learn that crying brings food, social attention, and general nourishment. The crying develops into basic cooing at around 3 months when babies begin to understand basic speech sounds. Cooing turns to babbling, which turns to a child’s first few communicative words by age one. By two or three years old, most children know about 500 words. There are developmental checklists that lay out these foundational steps in sequential order.
When working with students with moderate to severe disabilities, relationships and a student’s motivation are central to academic success. In Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), relationship building is also called pairing. Pairing is the process of establishing yourself as a reinforcer to build a positive relationship with a child. When a teacher or paraprofessional is properly paired with a student, the student should look forward to working with the adult. It is possible to pair people, environments, and objects.
Daily living skills are the routine self care activities that people engage in that promote independence. These skills span from toilet training to food preparation but generally help people maintain a level of health and safety. Some students with delays or disabilities are slow to master daily living skills but it is possible to teach these vital skills. Daily living skills are each set of multiple skills that are strung together. For instance, think about hand washing. Consider all of the smaller component skills that a person has to do to perform the larger task of hand washing: turning on the sink, pumping soap, tolerating getting wet, understanding clean versus dirty. Read on!
As adults, we rely on visual supports to navigate our daily lives. We often look to our Google calendars to see what’s next on our schedule. We create lists for the grocery store, and consult our never-ending to-do lists to complete tasks. Checking items off our lists and reviewing our calendar for what's next gives us a sense of accomplishment and reduces anxiety by providing clarity about our upcoming activities. Now, imagine being a 3, 4, or 5-year-old and getting placed inside a classroom with strangers, likely the first time away from parents for an extended period, with no idea about what will happen next. In these instances, implementation of visual supports can help ease the anxieties of our youngest learners, and especially for our students with disabilities.
Imagine that peak moment when something sour, like lemon or lime juice, hits your tongue. You experience a rush of sensations, from the tingling on your taste buds to the involuntary wince and twitch of your facial muscles. Now, think about those times when you have an irritating itch on your body that you just can't seem to soothe, no matter how hard you try. These sensations might seem like minor inconveniences to some, but for individuals with sensory processing challenges, they can be a daily struggle.
An inclusive classroom is defined as a classroom in which a general education teacher and a special education teacher work and instruct together to support all students in their classroom. Data from inclusive classrooms point to benefits across academic and social domains for students with and without disabilities: One 2015 study found that students with disabilities in inclusive settings are nearly five times more likely to graduate on time than peers that are not. Typically developing students in inclusion-based settings experienced social-emotional gains that their peers in non-inclusive settings did not. With 64.8% of students receiving special education services in inclusive classrooms, it is critical that these spaces function optimally to support all students, and that all stakeholders, from administrators to teachers to related service providers, are on the same page.
