Unique Learning Systems

We used Unique's free summer curriculum this summer just to try it out. I had the opportunity to add the 2009 middle school curriculum to a grant so we'll be using it this coming school year too. Overall I think I like the curriculum but it took a lot of adaptation to meet my students' needs and interests. I don't think it will be a "stand alone" or "solo" curriculum in my room, but paired with News-2-You and some of the other things we do, it should help to flesh things out in the area of academics. My ESY hours were cut in half because of tight budgets so I didn't get to spend as much time working with the curriculum as I would have liked.

What I liked about it:

• Two levels available, similar to the levels available for News-2-You. This came in handy this summer because I was working with kids age 5 to 16 and used the same curriculum for all of them. The younger kids couldn't sustain attention to the longer readings and needed more work with basic vocabulary. The older kids, who have been doing activities like these longer, did better on the longer readings and answering comprehension questions.
• The question guide at the bottom of the chapter pages was handy. It meant I could make the assignment and my paras could formulate questions themselves using available vocabulary pictures and/or yes/no responses. They would record the questions they asked and the kids' responses in the kids' data notebooks. It reduced the amount of worksheet creating, printing, cutting, and pasting that needed to be done.
• The length of the unit made it easier for me to pick and choose what to focus on. There were some areas we spent lots of time on (what is an ocean; ocean animals; beaches) and some we spent no time on (oceanography).
• The combination of science and social studies was nice and leant itself well to extension activities.
• PDF format was nice as well as being able to access the curriculum from an online account rather than needing to download it.

What I didn't like as much:

• Some concepts were far too abstract for my students (Oceanography) and I couldn't make them concrete enough to gain their understanding.
• More visuals would have been good such as actual photos of oceans, beaches, people engaging in related activities, ocean animals, etc. (I know I can go out and find my own, but having them included in the package would be very helpful)
• More support for multisensory learning would have been good such as ideas for objects/ object symbols, tactile experiences, sound sources, etc. We needed ways to make the concepts real or concrete for the students. Being in Kansas we couldn't exactly take a field trip to the beach/ocean and few of my students have had those experiences.
• Vocabulary access--I can't remember if the SymbolStix symbols for the unit were included or not; I tend to use Boardmaker but sometimes the SymbolStix symbol is better.
• A source for extension activities and sharing (see Kate's post for more information on ideas for this).
• Access to the illustrations separately would have been good for making discussion cards and flash cards without having to print out the entire page (I only have a pdf reader so can't edit).
• A range of levels for the extension activities would be good. For instance, my kids couldn't do any of the math activities (all involved money) because they don't have a grasp on those concepts. Sorting, matching, simple counting, more than/less than, comparison, and classification activities would be helpful. I want more than simple participation like activating a switch to give a (prerecorded) correct answer. I want my kids to work on actual skills development. They can do so much more than cause effect responses.

Some of the extension activities we did with the ocean/beaches unit:

• water and sand play including "clean the beach" where the kids dug through the sand to find "trash" and sorted "trash" and "good beach things" (shells, starfish, rocks, etc.)
• numerous ocean animal art projects I've collected over the years
• kids' literature like Rainbow Fish, Swimmy, Herman the Hermit Crab, etc. I also have several nonfiction books about ocean animals
• Is It a Fish? activity (on Adapted Learning so log in first)
• a number of computer based activities from Boardmaker/Adapted Learning and Intellitools
• threw stuffed ocean animals into our ball pool so the kids could go "scuba diving"
• discovery box filled with various ocean items and toys (shells, fish, plastic aquarium sea weed, aquarium "coral," scuba mask and snorkle, etc.)
• various cause effect ocean themed toys (our speech path found several at Enabling Devices --this was a favorite-- and I have a mini bubble tube with fish in it among others)
• listening to ocean sounds and "beach music" in our Somatron "music chair"
• Moon Sand sand castles
• Ocean in a Bottle (water bottle; choice of blue, green and/or purple food color; choice of glitter or sand; choice of small ocean themed items to put inside and stickers on the outside)

Overall I'm excited to have access to a true curriculum designed for my students. It's been a long time coming. With the addition of the creativity of others that is available out here in cyberspace, this promises to be an exciting adventure for us. I'm really looking forward to using it with state assessments this spring.

Happy Blog Birthday

Wow! Has it really been two months since I've posted? Bad SMDTeacher! BAD SMDTeacher! I know I've been busy but not that busy and it's not like I have nothing to blog about. I have all the stuff to share about several of our end-of-year projects. Then I need to do a retrospective on our favorite projects/activities/accomplishments of the year. I should probably go back to my New Year's post and see how close I came to meeting my goals. And then there is everything that has been going on over the summer. And what about goals for the upcoming "regular" school year? Oh, and there are the promised posts about favorite children's literature, favorite music to use with teaching, etc. And what about those Wizard of Oz photos? What about those?

So, for those of you who have been waiting with bated breath for me to get off the stick and start posting again, I pinky swear that I will do my best to get a few things up soon. And, just to help that out a little, in honor of my blog birthday (which apparently is a big deal in blog land), ASK ME SOME QUESTIONS! What do you want to know? Your interest will probably nudge me into sharing more.

Thoughts on Macaroni

Part 2 of my musings on Rob Rummel-Hudson's latest post...

As part of his discussion on the uselessness of state assessments, Rob also talks about what he terms as "macaroni art." I LOVE the term. My kids' parents tend to refer to it as "para art." You know what I'm talking about: the kid who can't hold a pencil and would prefer to eat a crayon rather than color with it comes home with a perfect masterpiece of an art project that in no way reflects the child's artistic abilities, lovingly created by a staff member at school so the child feels "included" and the parents don't feel "left out" or "burdened" by their child's disability and will have something "nice" to hang on the fridge. The parents mostly smile politely and quietly throw those projects away. They are meaningless. I have actually seen paras sit at a table alone and complete a project while the student whose name is on the project is elsewhere in the room doing something unrelated or worse, sits there totally disengaged, tuned out, or even ASLEEP! UGH!

One of the first things I teach my paras is the Principle of Partial Participation. Essentially, the mantra in my classroom is "No one can do everything but everyone can do something." We do NOT do "para art" in my program, although many of my paras do enjoy doing art and will often do their OWN project alongside the kids (thus the phenomenon of the multiplying dream catchers, HA HA). But, the projects my students do are wholy influenced by them. They might not be able to hold the marker or paint brush, but they can certainly pick the color or shape. We do a lot of "glue it on" projects. Those cute "follow-the-directions-cut-along-the-dotted-line" projects you can photocopy from teacher idea sites? Not for us. I choose techniques that are pretty "fool proof" like balloon stamping, finger print painting, daubing, mosaic, and decoupage. And I don't care if we have day-glo orange Totos or Dorothy has purple hair or the Emerald City ends up being more orange and brown than green. Projects of any sort MUST maximize choice making opportunities for the students or I won't even consider them. You won't find "coloring sheets" in my room (OK, except for one student who enjoys smashing the paint daubers onto them when she's working on color identification). Our projects turn out as varied and interesting as the kids themselves and I LOVE it. So do the parents, as evidenced by the numbers of our projects that I've seen hanging on fridges or lovingly displayed in rooms. For more examples of some of the projects we do, look in the side bar under "Curriculum" at posts about our News-2-You related projects. And I promise, Wizard of Oz project pix will be coming eventually.

I should also mention that my staff is forbidden to make choices FOR a student. I have students who don't particularly care to do most art projects and will communicate that by absolutely refusing to choose ANYTHING (we call it "staring through the wall"). Frustrating? You bet. But for me, "not choosing" is the choice and we honor that choice (even when the project is super cute and part of state assessments). There are consequences for not doing your work, just like for any other kid (I have really supportive parents). I can't stand it when people make choices "for" kids. All that teaches them is that their desires are irrelevant. A big serving of "learned helplessness" anyone? Seriously, if you want to see me lose my cool, go ahead and make that (non health and safety related) choice for one of my kiddos, I dare you.

So I say, "DOWN WITH MACARONI ART!" Unless of course, it's a macaroni collage that unquestioningly reflects the student--as in a big blob of glue in the middle of the page because the kid LOVES glue, with one little blue piece of macaroni stuck in it because he HATES making choices for art projects (or threw the other bits on the floor).

Can I Hear an "Amen!"

I look forward to new posts on Rob Rummel-Hudson's blog Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords. He is a good writer who is not afraid to "tell it like it is." His latest post hit so many notes with me on more than one topic that I may well end up doing more than one post referencing it.

The first part of today's post talks about federally mandated state assessments (NCLB). I agree with everything Rob states in his post. I won't repeat it here (go read it for yourself). I most liked his comments about kids with disabilities and how they are affected by these tests. You mean a kid on an IEP "failed" the reading test? Well DUH!!! I cannot come close to explaining the frustration I have as a special educator to be forced to put students into a no win, sure to fail situation. And then to be held accountable as the teacher for the fact that the child has a DISABILITY that INTERFERES with his ability to learn like other kids, take these tests, and in general, "meet proficiency" at "grade level." And I'm one of the fortunate (she says tongue in cheek because this is soooo not fun) few who gets to give the Alternate Assessments, which gives me the flexibility to basically pick and choose what my students do for their assessments (no bubble sheets or computer-based tests for us, just a small forest of trees in paperwork and way too much time away from kids). Every year I spend countless hours devising assessment activities, taking assessment data, compiling assessment data, filling out the forms, and putting together portfolios. THEN we get to score the things in a team of three. And what are we testing? Is it really relevant for a deaf-blind 13 year old with severe CP to be able to label his shapes? I mean, come on! The kid can't effectively communicate his wants and needs, why on earth does he need to know his shapes? Worse, these are a "point in time" assessment and can't be used to compare performance from year to year. Not to mention that we are basing our ratings on 3 pieces of "evidence" of 5 trials each, which is SO not best practice for determining student performance. In the end, the assessments are not an indicator on how well my students are doing with mastery of the state standards. Instead, they are an indicator of how creative I am as a teacher in making the "indicators" (tested items) work for my kids with a minimum of disruption to them (other than the fact that I'm stuck with paperwork for far too many hours instead of actually working with my students). The procedures are actually designed so that I can manipulate the data to make it look really good (good thing I'm an ethical teacher, but I do know other teachers who are "encouraged" strongly to do just that). I could go on and on about the absurdity and uselessness of the state assessments as they currently stand, and not just for special ed. I think they're pretty much a waste of time for everyone, except the bean counters. And if the Powers That Be read this, go ahead, audit me. I'm not worried. I know how to follow the rules. HA HA HA HA HA HA

OK, enough for that soapbox....

We Shall Remain

Hello all! No I haven't disappeared. Just been very very busy with a lot of things I can't discuss here. Plus, as I mentioned in my previous post, I've run into "teacher's block" (sort of like writer's block) and just haven't had too much to say. And of course, now that I'm in the mood to post, the little guy I'm doing respite for has decided that he MUST be out of bed and MUST have a snack and some playtime. It's waaaaaay past his bedtime. The stinker. :-)......

OK, problems solved with much giggling and even a couple of belly laughs plus a whole lot of cheese crackers on the floor, much to the dogs' delight. I LOVE this kid! Anyway, I mentioned that I was struggling with how to structure the rest of the regular school year for us and talked about doing something with the PBS series "We Shall Remain." That is indeed what I decided to go with. We got started a bit late so had to do two episodes last week (After the Mayflower, which is about the European "invasion" of America, and "Tecumseh's Vision" about Tecumseh's attempts to unite the Native American tribes into one nation separate from the white man). Both episodes were excellent although I will say we were all more fascinated by After the Mayflower (you mean the Pilgrims are actually the bad guys? How different would history be today if Massasoit had just decided to let those foolish Europeans die from their own ignorance). I'm using both the News-2-You and the website to create synopses of the episodes using Boardmaker which we read during Morning Meeting prior to watching the episodes (we watch during gross motor/standing time). One of my students, whose Dad is Puerto Rican, was fascinated by the pictures of Native Americans that I used and kept pointing to himself and then to the Smartboard, making it very clear that he thinks he looks like a Native American. Very cool. He got VERY ANGRY when the white men treated the Native Americans badly during the first episode and got really into it when the Native Americans fought back in the second. It was so neat to see him responding like this because he is usually completely disengaged from anything even remotely "academic."

We didn't do much of a project with After the Mayflower, although there are some nice Pilgrim and Indian crafts at dltk-kids.com and Kate also posted some great resources on her website. With Tecumseh's Vision we decided to make dream catchers. The project on dltk-kids did not work for us. It was designed by a teacher in the UK and we weren't able to lay hands on all the materials, particularly the mesh bags. We used this project instead. This is one of the most fun projects we've done, or at least one of the most popular. The kids enjoyed choosing colors and materials and the adults had a blast weaving (my group of students don't have the fine motor skills to do the weaving but had loads of fun checking the adults' work and criticizing, I mean commenting, on it). I think we have 20 or so of the things floating around the room at the moment. We made small ones. The challenging part was figuring out what to use for the rings. In the past we've brass embroidery rings but they are fairly expensive and we didn't have any in the supply closet (yes, this was yet another last minute project idea). What worked best was cutting the rim off of disposable plastic cups (the white, nearly transparent ones work the best). We also tried the rim off of plastic containers like cottage cheese and Cool Whip, but they were too flexible and didn't maintain their round shape. The rims off the LIDS however, worked great. However, the cups are cheap and there are lots of them available compared to the containers. For the string we used crochet thread (the kind used to make lace) for the smaller ones and yarn for the larger. We have a whole collection of various sized beads that we could string on as requested by the students. For the bottom the kids chose a feather (or 5) onto which we strung 3 pony beads (on the shaft end). These were then tied onto the bottom of the dream catcher either in a group or singly. They all turned out really neat. I forgot to take a picture of them but will add one later.

Next up we have The Trail of Tears, Geronimo, and Wounded Knee. I'm not exactly sure what projects we will do to enhance these topics as I need to keep things really simple. I do know we will be taking a trip to the Mid America All Indian Center which has recently reopened and is doing a bunch of stuff related to the We Shall Remain series. And there are more than a few good movies featuring Native Americans (and no, I'm not talking the John Wayne-type where the Indians are the bad guys). And maybe we can find someone from the Indian Center who would be willing to volunteer some time to come in and do drumming and storytelling with the kids. I also have a collection of Native American music we are listening to.

For those of you who would like to borrow my We Shall Remain Boardmaker adaptations:

Email me OR leave a comment with your email/contact information and I'll contact you about sharing. Some of what I have created uses copywrited materials owned by News-2-You so I have to be careful how I share. I plan to use this unit again in the fall closer to Thanksgiving with more activities.

Making Dust

A a kid we often went to my grandparents' farm. My brother's favorite thing to do, and later all the boys/cousins, was to put his bike up on blocks in the big shed, peddle as fast as he could and "make dust." That's how I'm feeling right now with school, like I'm just making dust but not getting anywhere.

We finished giving state assessments right before spring break. Because we use an alternate assessment system, this took up quite a lot of our time and structured our daily activities. We also implemented and completed a very involved unit on the Wizard of Oz (check the side bar under Projects). I had a plan with a goal: read the whole book and do related activities; gather all the needed evidence for state assessment portfolios. And now that we're finished with all of that, we seem to be just spinning our wheels. The day-to-day routines have become the "daily grind." Everyone, kids and adults alike, are bored with the same old same old. On top of all that we have had a constant in and out with absences from both students and staff, had one student move away resulting in a slight case of "over staffing" (I know I know, I should be happy and believe me I am NOT giving up a staff person until I have to; plus one of my paras wants to go back to college full time and will be making that move very soon) and not enough to do for everyone all the time. Add in some plans that haven't come to fruition quite as expected and some not-under-our-control interferences that have kept us completely out of routine, and well, I think we've hit the "spring doldrums." You know, that place where everyone is ready to move on but we're stuck with 5 weeks left of school before a brief break and new opportunities. We're not even all that motivated to fo out on community day, how bad is that? UGGHH!!

I need inspiration. This is one of those times that I miss NOT having a preset curriculum (creating my own curriculum is one of the things I love most about my job, but wow is it a lot of work!). How do I fill the last few weeks of school with fun, engaging, and meaningful activities? We're pretty well at a maintenance stage with most of our IEP goals. Where do we go from here? Kate posted some fun looking activities to go with The Princess Bride which look very intriguing, BUT do I really want to jump back into another extended study so soon after the Wizard of Oz extravaganza? News-2-You has an article on Native Americans and the new PBS series called We Shall Remain that I could do a lot of things with. Maybe we'll go with that, especially since the Mid America All Indian Center is reopening here in April and they have worked well with our special needs in the past. But that will take quite a bit of prep work and I have a number of time consuming commitments coming up (summer school planning, observing new-to-me students coming to summer school, grant proposals due, student recertifications due, progress reports, helping with a couple of professional development activities, grading state assessments, ......). Do I have time to do adequate justice to a Native American unit?

Any ideas out there anyone? Throw me a nice life preserver please!

Voices From Outer Space

We got to do the neatest thing this morning. A little background....

Every morning after breakfast we do Morning Meeting (here is my Morning Meeting routine posted on Adapted Learning). That usually takes 10-15 minutes depending upon what everyone has to say and how cooperative everyone is being. Which leaves us with 10 minutes or so before we start Rotations. During this time I usually put the CNN Student News on the Smartboard for the kids to watch while the grownups organize Rotations, finish bathroom trips and breakfast clean up, etc. Today there was a banner at the top of the Student News page indicating that President Obama was getting ready to speak to the astronauts on the International Space Station. We've just finished a mini unit on the Solar System and Space program so I clicked on the link out of curiosity. Nothing much going on so we went back to the Student News. I left the window open, however, and about 2 minutes later we heard NASA connecting with the Space Station. We switched back and got to watch a very interesting exchange between the President and a group of school children and the members of the Space Station team (listen here if you want). ALL of the kids were enthralled. Very cool. Technology is AMAZING!