Back to School Resources - Day 2 Classroom Management

Welcome to my BACK TO SCHOOL resource series! Through August 1st, I'll be sharing some of my hottest and newest resources with you for back to school in six different categories! 

Day 2 - Classroom Management 

Non-verbal Hand Signals - Minimize classroom disruptions with these simple non-verbal hand signals.

Or you may even like these classroom management hand-held signs.

Teach your students what a "good listener" looks like with these classroom visuals.

Teach classroom expectations in ALL school settings with this set of social stories.

Grab this FREE checklist to help you with teaching back to school procedures and routines.

Manage how students go home with this easy to manage resource here.

Manage your classroom jobs with these real photo job cards.

You may also like these editable name job cards.

Add a flip calendar as part of your student jobs and have a student flip it each day.

You can find all of these flip calendars HERE.

Add these visual cue cards to your daily routine and end the repeat of "What do I do next?" or "What are we supposed to be doing?" 

Get your lesson plans organized with my easy to use editable template designed for special education classrooms with multiple levels. The preview has a complete copy of my lesson plans for you to look at as an example. 

And no year is complete without a teacher planner!

And if you like to celebrate National Holidays in your classroom, download this freebie to add to your planner!

Many of my classroom management tools fall into the "parents" category which is on the line up for tomorrow. So come back tomorrow for more classroom management tools that will help you communicate effectively with parents.

ULS on iPads with Student View Feature

Do you use Unique Learning System (ULS)? I love ULS for my lower functioning students with Autism and other Intellectual Disabilities. ULS can be overwhelming at first and require a lot of printing and preparation, but with the new "Student View" component that was released last year, ULS has never been easier to implement, especially in small group centers. 

With "Student View," there is no printing and very little prepping! All 30 of the monthly ULS lessons are available in the Student View component and most students show higher student engagement when on an iPad!

Here's how to get to Student View. Once you are on your ULS Homepage, as shown below, click on n2y GPS.

A student will come up, or you can click on the vertical "students" tab on the left of the student profile photo as shown below, and then select the student you need. Just below the profile photo and to the right, click on "Student View."

All of the lessons for that month will be displayed in kid-friendly tabs as shown below. 

This is the Leveled Book for activity 1. Students can tap on the words and the words will be highlighted and read to them. 

Students can use the blue navigation tool you see on the right to advance from page to page.

They can click on the blue directional icon in the top right corner to see this gray pop up. This pop up allows you or students to expand or decrease the size of the book or activity.

The left and right arrows allow students to advance to the next page or go back. The "Go" button I especially LOVE! Click on it and easily access and display the communication board for that lesson or other story levels and resources that correspond with the lesson.

Click on the n2y Globe in the top left corner to go back to home, print, hide symbols from a worksheet, hide blue navigation tool, or exit.

You can also easily print the resources from student view if students need more practice! You have the option to print the current page or all pages if needed. 

Here is a view of one of the comprehension worksheets from the September lessons. I love how interactive it is! Students can tap the question and have it read to them. If they answer incorrectly, the program produces a "boing" type noise and a red square appears around their incorrect answer. If they get the answer correct, a green square will appear around their answer.  

You can instantly remove symbols from a worksheet, by clicking on the n2y globe, and "Hide Symbols." 

Again, students just click on the words they need read to them and the program will highlight them as they are read!

Math is just as easy and engaging!

When students tap on the answer box, a number bank will appear for them to choose from. It will also provide them with feedback by providing a green square around the answer and a "ding" if correct, and a red square and a "boing" is incorrect.

This is just an overview of the first few lessons in ULS Student View. Student View also works on desktop computers too! Play around with it yourself and see how you can use it in your classroom to engage learners and make your ULS planning and prep a much easier task!

SPED Interactive Notebooks are Here!!! {A Year-long Reading Curriculum}

Finally!!! An Interactive Notebook designed specifically for special education classrooms and just in time for BTS!!!! And, a year-long reading curriculum my friends, designed to build fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension!!! Yes, a year-long, with 36 weeks of daily activities!

I'm so excited to finally launch this and be able to share it with you for the upcoming school year! This is a collaborative resource I've worked on for over a year with Susan from "School Bells N' Whistles." So it is a true "Labor of Love!"

Each Monday, students are introduced to 5 new vocabulary words and a new reading passage. Passages are low readability and seasonal. Here's a peek at Week 2, and how the program works.

Students read the passage every day for 5 days as research shows that repeated readings increase and build fluency! They can time themselves or one another (kids love using the timers) and try to beat their time each day. Kids also love this challenge. Each time they read the story, they can color in a book. They also get to make a "Pocket Full of Words" to make daily practicing fun and easy.

On Tuesday, students complete WH questions about their story.

On Wednesday, they get to make a fun flipbook that focuses on comprehension and targets main idea, setting, characters, details, and vocabulary.

Thursday is sentence writing. Students have the option of writing the correct words in the boxes or cutting and pasting the words. 

Friday is a quiz that can easily be used for a weekly grade. The quizzes give students practice with multiple choice, true/false, and short answer items, and also targets skills such as antonyms, synonyms, and rhyming words.

I've tried Interactive Notebooks in my class before, but the cutting was just too daunting for my students! I love that my students will be able to manage the cutting with this set, as the cutting is very minimal and requires only simple straight cuts!

I love the ending results of IN's, and being able to showcase their year-long work in one book. It also makes such a great keepsake and allows everything to remain organized and easy to refer back to for review. They're really nice to show at conferences too or even IEP meetings!

If you're not a fan of IN's, this set can easily be used without them too! You could simply staple each week together, or possibly even spiral bind them.

You can check it out here, and be sure to download the preview to get a free weekly sample to try out in your classroom! You'll get everything you see above!

It's also currently discounted, so snag it up while you can and have your reading lesson plans all planned out for you when you head back to school soon!!

I plan to use my "Spelling for a Year" along with this set as it compliments this set nicely and includes a weekly phonics sheet designed for IN's that you could easily incorporate!

What reading program are you currently using in your classroom??

Special Education Lesson Plans

I always have sped teachers asking, "Can you share your lesson plans?" "What do your lesson plans look like?" So I thought I'd share mine with you today. 

I love my lesson plan template! Don't get me wrong...it took much trial and error, as isn't that the story of teaching, but this template has worked perfectly for me and my staff over the last couple of years! 

The Daily Overview
This is the first page of my weekly lesson plans. I think the daily overview is important! It gives you a quick glimpse of what's happening and gives anyone viewing the plans an overview of what everyone is doing at all times every day. It allows my aides to see exactly where they are expected to be. Even more importantly, if you put in a request for assistance for a 1:1 aide or such, or a student on campus needs more support, you will most likely be asked for documentation of how your aides are currently being used. This is your documentation! Being able to account for every minute of your aide's day is important in many ways. 

Here is a copy of what my weekly lesson plans look like as a whole, and then I will elaborate on each section. 

 

Now to elaborate on each section.
I always like to start the day with an independent activity. This gives me a chance to do attendance and wrap up anything else! My students come in each morning, remove their homework, agenda, and take-home daily logs from their backpacks. They place these 3 items in the appropriate trays, hang their backpacks up on their assigned hook, grab their morning work folder from their bin, and go to their assigned seat. My aides and I assist with their morning work as needed and check their morning work. 

Then we begin our Morning Meeting with a "Daily Fun Fact." I have the Fun Fact displayed on the Smartboard each morning they arrive. My students LOVE our Daily Fun Fact, but they have to complete their morning work first, so this entices them to get it done! 

 Daily Fun Facts 

After our Daily Fun Fact, is Morning Meeting where we review calendar, weather, money, time, place value, etc. But first, and just started this year, we do "crossing the mid-line" exercises. You can learn more here. 

Next, we break off into our math rotations.

This is my center rotation chart from last year. As you can see, I have four groups, four rotations, and groups are color coded and coordinate with their center activities. Since there are only 3 of us (adults) and four centers, my fourth center is always an independent center. During math centers, the independent center is computers/iPads and for my reading centers, the independent center is independent reading. My non-readers still love looking at the picture books. You can find more details about how my centers run, here. 

My lesson plans show what each aide and myself are doing with each group and what materials we need. I place these materials in color-coded baskets that correspond with the colors on the plans and that also corresponds with the color assigned to each group. 

This is the lesson plan for my center.

This is the lesson plan for my two aides. Aide 1 works the "At Your Seat" center, which is IEP Tubs. You can read more about my IEP Tubs here. Aide 2 works the "Number Work Center."


At 10:55 Math centers end and the whole class goes on computer. Luckily I have enough computers for each student. If you do not, maybe you have iPads and can distribute iPads to student that you don't have a computer for. I must mention to alleviate any confusion...I co-team with the Resource Room teacher for centers. So the students that have an asterick* by their name are his students and leave at this time. That leaves me with 5 students. 

At 11:30, we go to lunch. I don't like missing lunch with my students, but I also need a lunch too. So I overlap our lunches, which allows me to spend 1/2 of their lunch with them. So to get a bigger picture, it looks like this:

Students' lunch- 11:30-12:00
Aide 1- 11:15-11:45
My lunch- 11:45-12:15
Aide 2- 12:15-12:45

This gives me the opportunity to just visit with them and to observe them during this unstructured time. I don't like missing anything. I want to see how their eating, if they're opening their own packages, if they're chewing with their mouths closed, etc. Some of my students may have eating goals, so I want to be able to monitor those goals. Overlapping the lunches allows me to do that.

After lunch, one of my aides does a read aloud with my students, and one GoNoodle song, not reflected in plans. Then, we begin reading rotations. My lesson plan layout is pretty much the same as the math rotations. However, due to two resource room students moving away, I eliminated the yellow group from this block.

After reading rotations (resource students leave), we have whole group instruction again, and specials. Whole group is when we do life skills activities and where I incorporate science, social studies, health, and crafts. We always begin with a fluency fitness warm-up from "Tickled Pink in Primary." Her fluency fitness resources are amazing and my kids LOVE them!

At 2:05, my students do their classroom jobs and stack their chair, IF they don't have any missing work from the day! If they don't have any missing work, it is free choice and social time for them! When students misbehave and/or refuse to do their work during the day, I never negotiate with them, I simply say, "No problem," and go obviously drop it in the missing work tub. I would say 7/10 times, they decide to do it.

After social time, they go to specials. Once they return from specials, we line up for the bus.

Of course this schedule my change year to year depending upon times of specials and lunch times, but this is the jist of my lesson plan layout and how our day runs. I am lucky to have had specials at the end of the day the last two years. I really like specials being at the end for my students. If you're wondering, I am now teaching students in grades 3-5, rather than 1-5, so I split it in the middle and send my students to fourth grade specials. My students that are capable of attending specials without an aide, go with their grade level. 

And that's my lesson plans! 
I hope you'll be able to use some of these ideas to simplify your lesson planning. :) 

UPDATE: Due to an overwhelming interest in an editable copy of my template, I have added the link here.

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