End of Year Cleaning

The school year is wrapping up, and it’s time to start thinking about that end of year cleaning checklist. Those of you who work in schools, how do you handle this? Do you have a routine? Do you involve students? It can be a bit overwhelming some years.

I don’t know of many jobs where you have to pack up your entire office and work area on a  yearly basis other than teaching. I am glad for it though, because it provides an annual opportunity to reevaluate materials and setup. It’s a scheduled time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t, what was useful and what is just taking up space.

For me, it’s also a time to plan for next year. We have to have our classroom furniture setup taped to our board before we leave for the summer, so our generous custodial staff can arrange it for us when they return things to the room after clearing it out to clean. I cannot say how grateful I am to them for doing this. This is the only school I’ve heard of where they don’t just dump everything in the room and leave it to the teacher to arrange upon our return. It is a huge blessing! It does mean I have to have my layout planned several months in advance of the new year though, and once I get started with planning one aspect I just keep going…

I like to involve my students in cleaning on the very last day. I’m not going to get any productive, academic work out of them, but it’s still important they have structured tasks to do. I think it also helps students develop a sense of pride in their classroom and responsibility towards the classroom community, especially since two-thirds of my students will return to my room next year. They get to see their handiwork and feel pride in preparing the room for the incoming sixth grades.

This year I stumbled upon a cool idea for end of the year cleaning task cards for students over here at Chalk and Apples TpT store, and I decided to develop a similar idea. My students already have classroom jobs through the year, and we use a classroom economy. However, there are always a couple students who end the year in debt, and I’ve never really known what to do about this. I don’t want to roll the debt ever into the next year, because I like everyone to start on a fresh, positive note. There’s no practical consequence though, so this year I thought I would have students work off the debt by helping with end of year packing and cleaning. They were going to earn so much debt cancellation for different chores that needed doing. That didn’t work out very well, because all my students wanted to help clean, even though I gave the debt free students the option of free computer or phone time. So, while this activity failed to be a consequence for ending the year with debt, it was a very successful and helpful method for structuring the end of year clean up and organizing all the tasks students could help with.

Anyway this is what I came up with:

What do you think? You can download your own copy here at my TpT store. I laminated it and had students check off each task as they finished. Student favorites were the bulletin board and the supply closet. I actually had 2  students working together on the closet with my assistance. They really liked organizing everything and deciding where our supplies for next year would go. I also let them take home anything I didn’t want anymore.

I decided to go crayon free for next year. My middle school students have decided crayons are too young, and they haven’t been touched in my room for two years. I let my pencil sharpener take home as many as he wanted and then had him create bags of crayons for students to take home and give to younger siblings.

So, what do you do on the last day of school? Do you involve your students in cleaning and packing? If so what tasks do you have them do? Is there anything you would add or remove from my menu board?

LD Action: Creating Possibilities: Developing Your Child’s Ability to Self-Advocate

Source: LD Action: Creating Possibilities: Developing Your Child’s Ability to Self-Advocate

 

I just read a great article on teaching your children or students to advocate for themselves! Click the link above to read it. Though not specifically written for DHH children, this blog post is very applicable with a few additions. Be on the look out for a post from me soon about self-advocacy skills and children with hearing loss.

Student-Led IEP Meetings: Getting the Kids Involved

It seems like Student-Led IEP is a buzz word going around special education right now. I’m not sure who decided this was a new thing, but to me it has been part of my students’ transition goals since I was a student-teacher, writing IEPs for mentor teacher. It seemed to me the obvious first transition goal, since most students don’t yet know what they want to be career-wise and will likely change it multiple times. Why not instead have a goal that is more applicable to the students’ current needs, like say… understanding and participating in the meeting they are now required to attend?

My students actually really love their annual review. Last year, I even had one 8th grade student write her entire IEP with no more assistance than my supervision to make sure she included everything and placed it under the correct section. While my students tend not to lead the actual meeting, they do write at least a section of the IEP with or without my help. I also require them to do the introductions at the beginning of the meeting and read the transition section of the IEP.

I have had many administrators ask me how I prepare my students to do this. The secret is that every student keeps a copy of their IEP with them and we refer to it constantly to discuss what helps them and what they have a right to ask for in regular education classes. I also made up a packet that takes the students through the IEP sections step by step. You can see it here.

My students really like that they get a say in their accommodations and even their goals. They are much more motivated to achieve goals they wrote themselves, and they are more comfortable advocating for accommodations when they understand the why and the how of them (and that it is a legal requirement to fulfill them!).

Teaching Positive and Negative Integers in Special Education

Do your students struggle with adding or subtracting positive and negative integers? This can be a mind-blowing concept for some students when first introduced, but it doesn’t need to be. Here are 4 ways to teach this so all students understand:

Start with Something Familiar: Money

I introduce the topic of negatives by having a discussion about where they might have seen negative numbers. Someone might talk about temperature, particularly if this lesson happens to be during winter, if I’m lucky, a student might bring up coordinate places (cue perfect segway into the number line approach!), but invariably someone always mentions owing money. We have a classroom economy system, and it sometimes happens that a student might go into debt, so they’ve seen negative amounts of money. We just call it “debt” or “money owed.” Now though, we can discuss it as negatives.

Discuss what happens when money is earned or money is lost; this is adding and subtracting with negatives! Pull out the play money and an account register like this one I made here. Let the students have some hands on practice adding and subtracting dollars by giving them different real-world scenarios.

The Number Line/Coordinate Plane

If it happens that your students have already worked with 4 quadrant coordinate planes, then this method will be easy to help your students visualize adding and subtracting with negatives. I prefer the x and y axis plane, because you have both the horizontal and vertical number lines, but if it hasn’t been introduced to your students yet, just use whatever number line is familiar to your students.

Number lines allow students to not only compare integers, but to begin to view positive and negative numbers as opposites. To encourage this, I have students draw on transparency and label the x and y number lines on their papers using rulers to ensure spacing is even and exact. e fold the lines in half and discuss how the numbers are the same unit value (absolute value review here!), but negative is the opposite of positive, meaning it’s been removed. Put together, two opposite integers of the same value cancel each other out, giving a value of zero. This step is important for students to grasp for when we eventually get into equations with integers, but it is also helpful in understanding subtracting or adding negatives.

No Such Thing as Subtracting

After teaching these methods,  I then prep my students for a mind bender. I tell them there is no such thing as subtraction. It doesn’t exist; subtraction is just adding a negative! There is a great video clip of a PBS Math Club debate on this topic that you can watch here:

We then do some practice problems to drive the point home. I box the signs with the number it is attached to to help the students visualize how the subtraction sign is acting as an added negative.
Commutative Property

This one is short and sweet. I do a quick reteach of the commutative property. We’ve now looked at how the subtraction sign can be attached to a number to become an added negative. Commutative property helps students put this understanding to work by switching around different expressions. 4 – 7 is the same as -7 + 4. This helps students see how the minus/negative sign is attached to the number “behind” it. It also gives students the “permission” to move around the numbers into whatever order is easier for them to solve and adds some extra perspective into their practice.
Integer Song – Summary Activity

Finally, I give students the rules of adding and “subtracting” positive and negative numbers. My notes for them are brief and given only after teh previous discover activites.

1. If both numbers have the same sign add the values. Keep the sign the same.
2. If each number has a different sign, subtract the values. Give the answer the sign of the larger number
3. If there is a minus next to a negative, the 2 signs combine to become a positive(relate this to taking away debt). Then follow the above rules.

I type these notes up to give students a printed handout which they keep in a sheet protector in their math binders. Get your copy of my Integer Operations Rules Handout on my Teachers Pay Teachers Store.

We end this intro unit by singing a song to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

Same sign, add and keep. 

Different signs, subtract!

Keep the sign of the bigger number,

and it will be exact. 

Once we’ve finished all these activities, it’s time for some assessment to see where students are. This Formative Benchmark Negative Operations Quiz is great to get a good idea of where, or even if, students are still tripping up.

Bonus Strategy – Bird Beak

This year, one of my students came up with her own method of remembering rule 3: a minus sign next to a negative sign becomes a plus/positive sign. She drew this:

She thought it looks like a bird eating. Any time she sees the “eyes,” she knows to draw the beak and a the plus sign underneath.

8 Mistakes You May Be Making When Writing Tests

This morning I had a student come to me in tears before school started. She had checked her grades on the student portal on her phone while waiting in the morning car line, and she was devastated to discover that she had made an F on a test that she had really studied hard for, both in my resource room and at home. She was so upset and truly shocked.

Unfortunately, I was not shocked. Her Cued Speech transliterator was absent the day the student took the test, so her regular education teacher had her take the test to me so I could cue and read it aloud to her. This granted me a unique opportunity to see the test myself.

Yikes! There were several questions I had to read twice before even I understood what it was asking. Many questions were intentionally designed to be tricky, leading you to think it was looking for one answer when really that information was irrelevant to the actual intent of the question.

I understand that some teachers do this prepare students for college or standardized testing or, perhaps, even for convoluted situations that may occur in real life, but if the point of the assessment was to gauge the students’ current knowledge of the content on the test, then it fell far short of the goal. My student knew her stuff. We studied backwards and forwards together, and I made a Quizlet for her to practice at home. She even had her classmates and younger sister quiz her from the study guide several times, too. She not only memorized the study guide, but she really understood and could apply the information when prompted to. Before seeing the test, I had been confident she’d make an A.

As teachers, I think we need to very carefully analyze how we are writing our tests and why we are writing them that way. What is the goal of the assessment? Our goal should not be to trip up a previously confident student who had put in a ton of effort to learn the information. The goal should be to assess what they know and understand, and we need to make sure we are writing the tests accordingly.

Check out this blog post from Teach 4 the Heart about common mistakes teachers make when writing assessments that can alter the purpose of the assessment:8 Mistakes You May Be Making When Writing Tests. We don’t want students to memorize or guess, but we also don’t want to damage their motivation to continue studying by causing them to fail for reasons other than content understanding.

Encouraging Use of Assistive Hearing Devices

Encouraging Hearing Aid UseDo your students complain about wearing their CI processors or personal FMs? I have several students who refuse to wear their listening devices to the extent that they have begun “losing” or vandalizing these expensive devices, so that they won’t have to wear them. How do you encourage students to be proactive about their hearing access and wear the devices that we know helps them?

Does your school handle this as a personal choice? I know the residential schools I’ve worked at did so. The student could decide. However, all the mainstream schools I’ve worked at make it an IEP team decision at which the parent and/or teacher can overrule the students choice. We then end up providing very expensive equipment the students don’t want. I spend many mornings arguing, consoling, demanding, and explaining in an attempt to get those students to use the equipment.

I feel like I’ve tried everything. We’ve done behavior charts with rewards for using the equipment. We’ve had class discussions with hearing peers to explain what the equipment is; we’ve read books and comics with Deaf characters who use hearing devices to encourage pride. I’ve taught self-advocacy classes, and I’ve taught science classes on sound, hearing and hearing aids, CIs, and personal FMs. W’eve brought in parents and had family discussions. I’ve given consequences and filed police reports on the damaged equipment. I am out of ideas on my own.

I’m looking for solutions. How do you handle this? Do you have any tips or suggestions to try? I would appreciate any and all ideas to help me reach these kids who are falling behind.

What Does It Sound Like to Have Hearing Loss?

Have you ever wondered what it sounds like to have hearing loss?

When I was in college studying to become a teacher of the Deaf, our sign language instructor had us do a lifestyle experiment in which we had to plug up our ears to the best of our ability for a minimum of three days. She encouraged us not to change our normal routine and interactions during the experiment, so it forced us to engage with other. It was an interesting experiment.

The one thing I took away from it the most was how dismissive people were when they thought I was deaf, or even when they knew it was a class project. At the coffee shop, the barista refused to try to talk to me and just handed me pen and paper and looked away. That was fine, but because I was trying to study interactions I deliberately left details like size out of my written order in an attempt to force her to talk to me. Instead of asking, she just gave me the largest size and wouldn’t look at me when I tried to say I hadn’t wanted that. Most of my classmates and campus friends were more willing to repeat themselves, use rudimentary signs and pantomime, or write/text what they were saying. However, several walked away from me without explanation in the middle of sentences when they realized (as they later explained) that they realized I was part of the “Deaf thing people were doing.” I was surprised by people’s unwillingness put in the little extra effort to communicate, and the experiment taught me a lot about the struggles people with hearing loss can have just to socially interact with other people.

What the study didn’t teach me though, was how physically and mentally strenuous it is to try to listen and communicate with those you do interact with. That was the first thing I noticed my first year as a teacher, how incredibly tired my students were at the end of the day, even the ones who came in bubbling with energy. When you have hearing loss, listening and interpreting and filling in the missed information is draining! It takes a lot of concentration, thought, and effort.

Try it for yourself. The following websites can help you experience what it is like to listen with a hearing loss. Notice the amount of energy it takes for you to discern the speech when you don’t already know what they are saying.

http://www.starkey.com/hearing-loss-simulator 

http://successforkidswithhearingloss.com/demonstrations

http://www.audioservice.com/en/good-hearing/hearing-deterioration/online-hearing-simulation.html

What did you think? Was it harder or easier than you thought? Can you imagine listening like that every waking moment? It’s a wonder our DHH students are able to do as well as they do throughout the day.

Reading Logs

Ah, the dreaded question…how do we keep students accountable for independent reading? Do we record number of pages read, amount of time spent reading, types of genres explored? Do we require students to summarize reading, have parents sign off, or answer generic questions about their reading? We all know how important daily reading is for students to develop good language, vocabulary, reading comprehension, decoding, and writing skills. Daily reading improves all areas of learning by expanding background knowledge, vocabulary, exposure to sentences structures and imagination (a.k.a. critical thinking). 

My school’s policy is for students to read 20 minutes every day a minimum of 5 days a week. However, there are only 2 teachers I know of who actually monitor this required reading. Last year, I attempted to institute a reading log to monitor students reading in my own classroom. I decided to go with an evidence of comprehension model as opposed to a time or pages record. I was sorely disappointed with the results.

My goal was to get students to think beyond just telling the events that happened in their 20 minutes of reading. I wanted them to think about what they had read and the process of reading itself. Despite repeated modeling, whole-class and small-group correcting, and explicit sentence stems and group reading log writing sessions, I was never able to get my students beyond the point of summarizing what they read, if they even understood what they were reading well enough to be able to summarize what happened in the first place.

Here is what I gave them to glue into their composition bound reading log as reference: read_log_and_rubric I found it for free on Teachers Pay Teachers and modified it to meet my students’ needs. I no longer remember who sold this product. If you recognize it please let me know so that I may give the correct person credit for this great resource.

Despite being a few weeks into the current school year, I am still not sure what I am going to do for reading logs. Any suggestions? I may just repeat what I did last year and continue trying to model and correct. Maybe they will eventually build up the higher level skills?

Our First Week Back!

Wow! It has been a fantastic first week of school here! I have never had a year begin so smoothly. Hopefully, this a good omen of the months to come.

We started our week on Tuesday since Monday was Meet the Teachers day. One of our parents was kind enough to mention that “You know your child’s teacher is in the right place when Meet the Teacher is more of a family reunion, and the kids are actually excited to start back to school.” I was so happy to hear her view the day that way; although I do have a bit of an advantage since I keep my students for 3 years in a row.

Tuesday started with a rush of FM equipment assignments. How do you manage your hearing equipment monitoring and organization? I have 13 students in my school who use FM equipment in addition to their hearing aids and/or cochlear implants. 12 of them keep their equipment in my room, and that’s a lot of chargers, wires, transmitters, and individually programmed receivers to keep sorted. It took a bit of practice, but I think I have gotten my students trained to the system of coming a few minutes early to school, going directly to my classroom, putting on and syncing their own receivers, providing an adult with the transmitter to do the Ling 6 sound check, and then marking their monitor documents themselves with the correct annotation to note if the equipment is working or if there was a problem. Then, at the end of the day, the students leave their class a few minutes early to return the equipment to my room and hook everything up to the chargers labeled with their initials. It is a smooth system that has worked for me the last 3 years. I will give more detail about this in a later post if there is interest. Do you do something different? I would love to hear about it?

In my self-contained classroom, all my kids were returning students, so I kept all my classroom routines and rules either the same or pretty similar. This made reviewing the procedures quick and easy. I addressed changes as the need arose so as not overwhelm any students. They were more receptive than I expected since some of my students with OHI (OCD) or ASD are typically highly resistant to changes in procedures.  There were really very few classroom changes though.

I started right in on academics on Wednesday.In 8th grade science, our unit is “Our Changing Earth: Structures and Processes.” We are learning about the layers of the Earth, plate tectonics, and continental drift for the next two weeks. 7th grade is doing a chemistry unit, but in my room, we will only be studying the 4 states of matter and then the difference between homogeneous and heterogeneous mixtures. The rest of it a bit too abstract, and won’t have much real life application for the students chosen career categories. Social Studies is U.S. History with a focus on South Carolina, so we are starting with a unit on Native Americans. I’m doing a cross-curricular unit with that and ELA, since the ELA unit is myths with a theme of cultural identity. In math, we started with a unit on 3D shapes to begin our geometry focus.

The students were great all week. They did well getting to their inclusions classes on time and finding their way around the school. Most of them have at least one core class in the general education environment, and they are doing well keeping up this first week and advocating for their accommodations. Altogether, they have done really well, and I hope it continues.

How was your first week? If you haven’t started school yet, what are you doing to prepare?

Back to School!

Hello, Everyone! I hope you have all had a great summer. It has been a while since I’ve been in one place long enough to sit down and write a blog post. I’m itinerant with my Extended School Year students in the summer, and then I was lucky enough to go on an awesome road trip around the Midwest during which I had pretty much zero internet access.

But school started back yesterday, and I’m on my second day with students! We have an a blessedly smooth start to the year. All but 3 of my 11 students had already had me for at least 1 year. I kept all of my rules and most of my procedures exactly the same, so there would be no confusion of the old way vs. the new way that caused a problem at the start of my last school year.

The students stepped smoothly into back academic mode and gave only cursory complaints at having to go back to waking up “so so very early.” (I was right there with them, even if I didn’t let on.) I did institute an addition to my classroom behavior plan (more about that later) that may have helped reduce complaints and encourage on task behavior.

I intend to give you a full debriefing about our first week back to school after Friday has wrapped up, but I did want to catch all of you up on that Summer Teacher Bucket List I mentioned in this post. Here is the list again with commentary.

Teacher-y Bucket List

• 40 hours itinerant Extended School Year I managed to fit in all 40 hours of service before the last week of July, which is the earliest I have ever finished summer schooling. My students and I were equally thrilled, because it gave us a sold 3.5 weeks (2.5 for me since teachers started back a week earlier) of summer before the 15-16 school year started up.
• Summer Academy PD workshops  This was semi-helpful. The Stetson courses gave tips on differentiating, but many of them were pretty common sense to special education teachers who are used to having multiple ages, grades, and abilities in one room. I did manage to pull out a couple of helpful pointers and I was reminded of some activities I had forgotten about, so that was good. I did attend an excellent training on the SRA curriculum. I have used the curriculum for years, but had never actually been trained on it. This was incredibly beneficial, and really helped explain what was being done wrong to cause some of the problems I had previously encountered. Do any of you use SRA? If so which courses? I would love to hear how you incorporate it into your class.
• teach parent and student ASL classes I did teach student ASL classes all through the summer. None of my parents attended more than one class though. It’s a good bit more to it than in Cued Speech, so I think they may have been overwhelmed. The kids stuck it out though, and we made great progress!
• plan daily math centers with independent, hands-on activities I’m to say I never really got around to this. I sat down several times, and I just could not figure out a way that would allow the students to be completely independent in the center from beginning to end when they can’t read. Any tips? I don’t have BoardMaker, or any software like that, and reading/explaining the directions to them defeats the intention between my wanting to set up these center. The goal was for me to let them work, so they could let me work with my resource students without interruption. Reading to them would require I leave my resource kids in the middle of the lesson when my math kids come in.
• select class novel and write reading guide and lesson plans I selected Our Strange, New Land: Elizabeth’s Diary by Patricia Hermes. It has a Lexile level of only 350 according to one calculator, so I am hoping it will be an appropriate read for even my lowest student if we preteach vocabulary and time the novel to read it after we’ve finished our Colonial American unit in social studies. It will be a good opportunity to do cross curricular activities with history, ELA, geography, math, and art. I’m really looking forward to it.
• get TESOL certification This did not happen. I did look into a program, but they offer guaranteed job placement that you must use within one year. I’m not quite ready to make that change just yet, so I’m putting this off for at least another year.
• improve Cued Speech fluency I did practice. My students still complain I’m too slow and make mistakes, but hopefully there’s been some improvement. Perhaps they just forgot how poor my fluency was at the end of last year. Yikes! I think I’m a little better than I was then.
• develop way to integrate Cued Speech reading instruction Integration did not happen, but I did manage to get a transliterator to agree to offer classes to my seventh graders during their resource period, so that’s something.
• make conversation sentence stem cards to help with language samples and class discussions I have started this, but it’s not quite finished yet. Stay tuned!

Non-Teacher-y Bucket List

• Italy trip Check!
• Colorado wedding road trip Check!
• visit college friends (Atlanta, Virginia, Nashville) Check on 2 of the 3. I never made it up to Virginia. We have an overdue Skype date set for tomorrow though!
• sew travel kit accessories Check!
• sew placemats This one hasn’t happened yet, but I did get the materials, so perhaps sometime soon.
• knit sheep baby blanket I’m about 4 inches deep into this blanket, but I did double the width since it seemed a little small. It’s coming along nicely.
• finish mug storage Check! Just need to hang it on a wall now…

I was not quite as good about following though on my Reading Bucket List. I’ve only read 2 of the 5, Building Academic Language and The Lady in Gold, partly because I joined a book club at the start of the summer and ended up reading a ton of really enthralling novels.

• I Can Hear You Whisper: An Intimate Journey Through the Science of Sound and Language  by Lydia Denworth
• Talking Hands by Margalit Fox
• When the Brain Can’t Hear: Unraveling the Mystery of Auditory Processing Disorder by Dr. Teri James Bellis, Ph.D.
• Building Academic Language: Essential Practices for Content Classrooms Excellent read! Very informative, and it helped to kick-start my sentence stem prompts I’m still working on. I highly recommend this. Be on the look out for a book review here soon.
• The Lady in Gold Not as great as I expected but there was a solid middle section that was very historically illuminating, and I do enjoy my history! (as my students tell you with a moan)

That was it. Check back Saturday for a window into our first week of school!