More Lesson Planning Tips for Special Education

Before you begin reading, make sure you check out Part 1 of Curriculum Mapping! I wanted to share more lesson planning tips.

Let’s dive in! Now that you have the standards at the student’s academic levels laid out, an understanding of the curriculum and supplemental materials that you have and connections to student IEP goals, you must now put it into action to complete your curriculum mapping!

*If you have a scope and sequence for your curriculum, follow that. If your students are unable to access the curriculum appropriately, this post is for you!

Start with the foundation

Think about these lesson planning tips like building a house. You wouldn’t start building the bedrooms without laying the foundation. 

When school starts in September, many of our learners aren’t quite ready to hit the ground running with new concepts. It is important to review and refresh their memory on concepts they have already been exposed to and mastered. 

We all know that many of our students regress in the summer months and have a hard time remembering content they have mastered the year prior. Take some time to check for their current knowledge of the content you think you may want to teach. 

Take a look at my previous blog post of why I don’t teach academics until Halloween to find out what I teach instead!

It is important to take some time to ease your students back into their routines of school. Review old concepts and get a good understanding of their knowledge throughout September and into October. 

For the sake of clarity, I’ll explain how I map out Mathematics for my students. 

Build the first floor foundation for lesson planning

Once you have established where your students are, you should have an understanding of where you need to go. Start from the ground up. For my students, it includes re-teaching numbers, shapes, colors, 1:1 correspondence and more. These types of concepts will help them work from the ground up. 

I spend about 1-3 weeks on each topic. These lead into units of content to teach. Many of these units help gain mastery for my students, but some students, I report where their mastery level is at and we continue to move forward. 

For example, a student may be able to master 1:1 correspondence up to 3 but past that, their accuracy decreases dramatically. 

For many of my students, they struggle with numbers or 1:1 correspondence. I use what is called a spiralling scope and sequence. This allows the same concept to be practiced multiple times throughout the year. Lesson planning can be repetitive.

My students will practice number ID, counting and 1:1 correspondence in :

• Telling time
• Money 
• Budgeting 
• More or Less
• Patterns
• Addition
• Subtraction 

Laying down brick.. by brick in lesson planning

Now, I know what you’re thinking. If you’re working on number identification, why would you teach addition? 

Hear me out, my students are 11-14 years old. They’ve been working on number identification since they were infants. How would you feel if you’ve been working on the same skill for over 5 years… close to 10 years?

I don’t expect students to master addition skills before number identification but this type of exposure will open them up to new concepts and may be an opportunity they would not typically have. 

Working on multiple rooms in the house at once

As I was saying, my students will be able to work on their foundational skills across multiple units in a school year. 

For students working on telling time, I may have them identify the numbers on the digital clock. They may not say “one thirty” but they may say “one three zero”. I would then model saying “one thirty”. I don’t want to teach incorrect skills, but I will model the correct responses without telling them that they’re wrong. 

For students working on money, they will identify the bills or count dollar bills to work with number identification and 1:1 correspondence. You see the pattern. I will track their IEP goals in multiple units but I do not have to make much of an extra effort. 

Find times in your lesson planning when you can work on each student’s IEP goals… or make time! I will be writing a post soon to explain how I use stations in the classroom. 

Spiraling the staircase (lesson planning) 

Once you have a clear understanding of the 10 or so skills you want your students to participate in, you can repeat it multiple times throughout the year. 

We all know our students do better with repetition. Instead of spending a month or two on one concept, I spend 1-3 weeks at the beginning of the year and loop back for 1-3 weeks at the end of the year. Mainly, I break concepts down by semester. 

I always try to do measurement tools around Thanksgiving/Fall Break so that students can help their parents in the kitchen when cooking. I also try to teach money and budgeting around the winter holidays so students can practice buying gifts for others. 

Conclusion for Lesson Planning

Lesson planning can be overwhelming, confusing, and honestly time consuming. If you ever have any questions or want me to show you some more information, feel free to reach out on social media! 

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