IEPs + Math = New post

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Special Education is a hard field to get into these days. Most teachers have to really love working with those types of children since they are very needy, and they need to look for diverse and functional ways to teach these types of students.
I know for a fact that teaching mathematics is not an easy thing to do, and let’s on the idea of teaching students that have an IEP. How do you reach these students? Is there a way to help them? This post was asking fellow teachers how you reach students with special needs in the math realm. In this current teaching era, mathematics has taken big steps and the work has gotten much more difficult. Is there a way to help these students that are struggling in one of the most difficult core subjects we have to teach?


· Explain areas of agreement, disagreement, concerns, advise, etc.

Most of the teachers have had experience with similar situations, and have different advice on teaching students with IEPs or in a resource room/AIS setting. The first idea is to establish where these students are academically. What level are they functioning on? This can give the teacher an idea of where to start with each individual student. It’s easier when most of the students are working on the same (or close to) level, meaning that the teacher can simply work with them as a group. If it so happens that the students are not on the same level, this makes things a little harder. Some of the teachers indicated the use of an assistant within the class. If there happens to be one, have the assistant take a group of students, while the teacher works with the other.

An idea that was interesting to me was the use of a daily do now. While this specifically is not completely new to the classroom, the idea was to have 5 examples up on the board and have the student pick two or three. These questions can me from state tests, or from textbook work that they have done. The do now’s should be refreshers, and can be done as a whole, individually, or in groups. It gives the students a boost of confidence, showing them that they can do math.

One teacher happened to bring up a series on the computer. I enjoyed this idea, but it would be hard since not many schools have a lot of computer access. She indicated a program that would help students work out problems step by step, and had a feature where the teacher can control (or basically lock student computers from outside interference) and show them via the computer how to solve a problem.

• Include any follow up of activities that you tried with your students that you hadlearned about from the list, shared with other teachers, or used for another graduate course.
  

I feel like I am teaching AIS and resource a lot of the time within my classroom. Sadly enough, while this teacher says that she has an hour with each class (6th and 8th grade) I only have 40 minutes. As much as I would enjoy doing a lot of these activities with my classes, I feel that they lack a lot of the motivation to do so. As we all know from past posts, my students aren’t the most well behaved classes.

However, from reading the posts from different authors and gaining their advice I am trying to find ways to get through to my classes. I have gotten many comments and words of wisdom, mainly on keeping them quiet, and I know I will try to implement them more into the future. Hopefully things will work out for the better.