Region 17 Inclusion Support

This Thanksgiving craft is designed to give students who are blind or visually impaired, including those with multiple disabilities, practice with fine motor skills and tactile discrimination. Click here for craft details.

I can go deep into all the research but let's keep it real! If you want improvement, you need good practice. If you don't believe me, ask your football coach! Deliberate practice characterized by individual goals, immediate feedback, and date-driven adjustments- leads to expert performance. Deliberate reading practice involves:

• Appropriately challenging texts that are within the student’s zone of proximal development, or “stretch zone”;
• Clear instructional goals tailored to the student’s specific areas of need;
• The student reading aloud to a teacher or trained tutor who provides immediate corrective feedback and coaching (Try Reading Coach!); and
• Insights from assessments or practice sessions that guide the focus of future instruction.

The key is knowing where your students are at and intentionally setting goals and planning!

Instead of spending the last minutes of class cleaning up or reviewing homework, try creative closing activities that help students process new material and have fun in the process. These activities can be used to check for understanding, correct misconceptions, and engage students. Closing activities don’t need to be daily or highly planned—they can be applied at the end of a chapter or unit, and can incorporate movement, technology, or social-emotional learning to strengthen the classroom community.

1. Two-Dollar Summary: Students write a brief summary of the lesson, with each word valued at 10 cents. To make it more challenging, they can explain it like they’re teaching a younger student.

2. Clear or Cloudy: Students identify what they understand (“clear”) and what’s still unclear (“cloudy”) about the lesson. This can be done via a handout or exit ticket.

3. Appreciation, Apology, Aha!: In a circle, students share an appreciation, an apology, or an "aha" moment from the lesson. This activity fosters reflection and social bonding.

4. Headlines or Six-word Summaries: Students create news headlines or a six-word summary to capture the key concept of the lesson, encouraging concise thinking.

5. Traffic Light: Using sticky notes, students categorize what they’ve learned (green), what they’re still unsure about (yellow), and what they’re struggling with (red) on a traffic light image.

6. Video Journals: Students create short video journals using apps like ChatterPix to reflect on the lesson. This is a fun, tech-based activity for unit wrap-ups.

7. Rock, Paper, Scissors Reflection: In a reflection worksheet, students identify the hardest part of the lesson (rock), the main idea (paper), and less important details to discard (scissors).

8. Quiz the Next Class: Students create quiz questions on platforms like Kahoot! to test future classes, promoting deeper engagement with the material.

9. Make Your Classroom a Beach: A beach ball is tossed around the room with reflective questions written on it. Students answer the question their thumb or finger lands on, encouraging movement and discussion.

10. Optimistic Closures: Activities like the "One Word Share" encourage students to reflect on the day’s learning by sharing a single word that sums up their feelings or highlights from the lesson, with responses captured in a word cloud.

11. And an extra one- Review Relay: This strategy promotes active student engagement by encouraging peer-to-peer interactions, critical thinking, and the reinforcement of new material. By providing question stems and vocabulary supports, it makes it easier for students to collaborate and build deeper understanding. Teachers can adapt it to any subject area, making it a versatile and effective tool to boost student participation and retention.

These activities promote reflection, understanding, and fun while also reinforcing learning.

https://www.edutopia.org/article/10-powerful-ways-to-end-your-lessons?utm_content=linkpos&utm_campaign=weekly-2024-11-06&utm_medium=email&utm_source=edu-newsletter

The Concrete-Representational-Abstract (CRA) method is a sequential instructional approach that helps students move from hands-on, concrete materials to representational drawings, and finally to abstract symbols. This progression is essential for building the mental frameworks necessary for deep conceptual understanding.

It's crucial to emphasize the use of concrete manipulatives when introducing new concepts. Students need these hands-on tools to fully grasp an idea before moving to more abstract representations. While videos and other digital tools can be engaging, they often skip this critical step. Understanding the value of numbers, for instance, is best supported by actively using manipulatives, not just by singing number songs and matching names to symbols. This approach is especially critical when working with younger students, but it should also be an essential step in teaching new concepts at all grade levels.

By grounding learning in concrete experiences, we provide students with the foundation they need to make connections and develop a strong conceptual understanding.

Here are a few simple strategies to scaffold and adapt holiday writing activities:

• 1. Drawings and Digital Composing
     Allowing students to draw or add digital pictures can spark conversation and support language development. This helps to activate their creativity and engage them in the writing process.

  2. Word Banks
     Provide students with key vocabulary or thematic words to include in their writing. This reduces the pressure of spelling and minimizes language barriers, allowing them to focus on their ideas. Introducing new words also helps expand their vocabulary!

  3. Sentence Stems or Frames
     Offering sentence starters or templates gives students a helpful structure to begin writing and stay on topic. Sometimes, a little nudge is all it takes to overcome the challenge of starting a task.

  4. Modeling
     Just like adults seek examples when writing important documents (such as recommendation letters or emails), students benefit from seeing a model of good writing. Read books aloud and demonstrate a "think-aloud" process, showing how a mentor text can be used as a guide for their own writing.

  By incorporating these strategies, you can make holiday writing activities both enjoyable and accessible for all students!

Watch as this teacher uses the Gradual Release Model to teach the writing strategy of using vivid imagery. Students first engage in a discussion about the strategy, observe it being modeled, participate in guided practice, and then apply the strategy independently.

Since writing is a complex skill, students can become more effective writers and develop a stronger sense of themselves as writers when they learn strategies for different stages of the writing process. Explicitly teaching writing strategies—such as enhancing word choice, sentence combining, adding detail, and revising based on feedback—helps students build a toolkit of techniques to improve their writing.

A structured instructional method like Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) further deepens students' understanding by guiding them through a clear, step-by-step process: building background knowledge, discussing the strategy, modeling it, memorizing it, supporting practice, and finally providing opportunities for independent application.

Digital Promise. (n.d.). Direct instruction writing strategies for literacy 4-6. Digital Promise. Retrieved November 15, 2024, from https://lvp.digitalpromiseglobal.org/content-area/literacy-4-6/strategies/direct-instruction-writing-strategies-literacy-4-6/summary

Dyslexia and dysgraphia are both learning differences. Dyslexia primarily affects reading. Dysgraphia mainly affects writing. While they’re different, the two are easy to confuse. They share symptoms and often occur together. This table can help you tell them apart. - Kate Kelly

Due to unforeseen jury duty, we have cancelled paraprofessional training for 11/11/24. Please join us on 11/14/24 for the scheduled repeated sessions.

• 11/20/24: Job Jamboree
• 12/04/24: PBIS PLC #4
• 12/05/24: How Do I Grade This? Effective Practices from IEP Progress Monitoring to Report Cards
• 12/09/24: Standards Based IEP-Day 2
• 12/13/24: Adapting Reading by Design for Specially Designed Instruction
• 12/13/24: BVI PLC
• 12/17/24: Enhancing IEPs: Ensuraing Quality and Rigor

If you have a student receiving inclusion in your general education classroom and you need resources and/or instructional support, please let me know! I am here to support you!

Inclusion/Assessment

edesantiago@esc17.net
806-281-5858
1111 West Loop 289, Lubbock, TX, USA