Blog | Enable 2 Learn

Wikki What?

August 21, 2017 by Felicity

Developing Fine Motor Skills With Wikki Stix

Most everyone has heard about Wikileaks and Wikipedia, but how about Wikki Stix? Wikki Stix are colorful strings that have been coated with wax, allowing them to bend into any shape, and to stick and unstick from paper and other materials.

Many students with intellectual disabilities struggle with the fine motor skills needed to form numbers and letters, write on a line and color. Wikki Stix are a great tool to help students who struggle with these skills.

I loved using these waxed strings to help students with coloring within the lines. Prior to the activity, press a strip along the outside edge of the coloring area. If the coloring needs to be done in a specific color, you can use that color WikkiStix to outline the shape. The Wikki Stix provides a firm barrier acting as stencil.

Another way to use the sticks is to allow the student to press them along a letter, shape or number. This is a great tactile activity to help reinforce learning while

Practicing fine motor skills using Wikki Stix

also practicing hand to eye coordination and fine motor skills. This practice makes a fun center, or can be used during independent work periods.

Happily, Wikki Stix are affordable…a pack of 48 sticks cost around $7.00, and you can use them over and over. I used the same pack for an entire school year!

Do you use Wikki Stix in your classroom? I’d love to hear about your creative ideas for using this versatile tool!

For more ideas on how to use Wikki Sticks, check out their website and blog.

https://www.wikkistix.com/special-needs/

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Empathy, The Ultimate Behavior Management Tool

August 10, 2017 by Felicity

As a teacher in a self-contained classroom, I often had students that exhibited difficult behaviors. These behaviors ranged from the physical, including spitting, hitting, throwing objects (including chairs!) and the emotional, such as crying, screaming or a complete shutdown.

Naturally with the more violent behaviors, the first step is to ensure that the student and everyone else are safe. I often found that the next most effective step to de-escalate a problem was to offer empathy. By giving a student empathy you validate their emotions, letting them know that you care about how they feel. You are telling the student that you want to understand what is making them upset and that you want to help them deal with the problem in an acceptable way.

If you know your student, you can often suggest what might have triggered the behavior. For example I had a student with moderate intellectual disabilities who had a very difficult home life. Among other pressures, he had an older brother with disabilities who would become so violent that the police had to be called in. This student would come to class angry and non-complaint, disrupting the class by knocking things down and refusing all requests. No amount of persuasion, positive reinforcement or consequences had any affect.

One day it occurred to me to ask him about his morning, and specifically if someone had bothered him (his brother bullied him as well). His defensive posture evaporated almost instantly and he said his brother had eaten all the cereal. I immediately offered him great sympathy, asked him if he was hungry (he was) and asked my assistant to fetch him some cereal from the cafeteria. While telling him how sorry I was that he had a hard morning, and specifically that I was also angry at his brother for eating all the cereal, I guided him to his seat. I then gave him a simple task to complete to keep the compliance momentum going.

By offering empathy, you give the student the opportunity to reflect on what is causing him to act out and you are also letting him know that you care. In addition, you are also taking a step back to consider where the behavior is coming from emotionally.

To understand the emotional component of a behavior is considerably more helpful to both you and the student than to just see that the behavior. For example, let’s say you have a student who runs from the room, a very distressing behavior for any teacher to deal with. Obviously the first thing you have to do is stop the student from running away. The temptation might be to tell the student that running from the room is not allowed, that there will be consequences etc. This tactic is unlikely to change the behavior. I would suggest that you try offering empathy by saying something like “I understand you don’t want to sit in the classroom right now. Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you.” The student will probably be surprised when you say this!

If the student is verbal, encourage him to tell you why he ran out, and then use his reasons to sympathize and problem solve. (“Yes, it is hot in there, let’s open a window. “ “Yes, we’ve been sitting a long time, let’s go take a stretch break.” etc.) If the student is non-verbal, reiterate the behavior and offer a solution (“I’m sorry you don’t want to sit in the classroom. We will go to lunch very soon.”)

Once a student knows that you empathize with them, you are at a much better place to teach replacement behaviors. Social stories are a great tool for teaching them. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog about how to create individualized social stories to target specific behaviors!

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Break It Down!

August 8, 2017 by Felicity

Break It Down!

Simplifying Instruction is a Critical Teaching Strategy for Students with Intellectual Disabilities

When I earned my Masters Degree in Special Education with a dual emphasis in Emotional Disabilities and Intellectual Disabilities, I felt relatively confident that my education had given me the skills I’d need to be a good teacher. I hoped that my dedication and enthusiasm would eventually lead me to being even better than good.

My first week as a new teacher in a self-contained classroom for students with moderate intellectual disabilities, showed me that I had a lot to learn as I made my first big teaching blunder that took months to undo.

Several of my students had coin identification as a math goal on their IEP’s. Full of confidence, armed with visuals, coins and a dozen different lesson plans, I felt like I was hitting the ground running. All I really did was hit the ground! What was the mistake? I introduced all four coins AT THE SAME TIME! For all you experienced teachers out there, you are probably wondering how I could have made this fundamental mistake. Well, I’m not sure, but that’s what I did. For all you new teachers—don’t do that! One of the first rules of teaching students with intellectual disabilities? Break it down!

Weeks into teaching coin identification, I would show a student a penny and they would call it a quarter, or nickel. Or maybe they would correctly identify it as a penny the first time, and but then a dime the next. Somehow they managed to learn all the names of the coins, but were unable to connect the name of a coin with the coin itself. Frustrated, I went to my mentor for help, and explained to her how my students just couldn’t seem to learn the coins despite my best efforts. After I explained all the techniques I had used, she asked me the critical question…”Which coin did you start with?” Oooops!

So that was my big mistake, and a lesson I never forgot. To help students with intellectual disabilities gain new information, it is critical that you break it down into its simplest components. If it’s coins, one coin at a time, only adding the next coin after the first one is mastered, and then reviewing the previous coin with the new one and so on. If it’s the parts of a book, one part at a time! How to wash your hands? One step at a time.

Breaking it down may seem tedious, time consuming, or even at times unnecessary, but believe me, trying to un-teach information is much worse!

Have you had an “Ooops!” teaching experience? Share it here, and let’s learn from each others mistakes!

Writing Is More Fun With Choices!

August 2, 2017 by Felicity

Many students with intellectual disabilities have excellent fine motor writing skills and enjoy writing, drawing and coloring. I’ve had several students that were excellent artists, amazing everyone with their skill at drawing with perspective and creativity, while others took great pride in their penmanship.

But what about those students who struggle to hold a writing implement, lack the control to apply appropriate pressure or the stability to form the shapes necessary to write? Often times these students resist practicing these skills, repeatedly breaking the pencil points, tearing the paper, or tossing the writing implement to the floor.

I found that an excellent way to help reluctant students participate in and even enjoy these fine motor skills is to give them choices. Instead of getting out the usual paper and pencil, try offering the student a choice between a white board and marker, a piece of black paper with chalk, highlighter markers, gel pens, markers, or a chalkboard, with a paintbrush and a bit of water. Any tool that can be held in the manner of a pencil can be used to help students practice writing!

To encourage the student to use the materials for practicing their skills, I suggest that you prepare the material that is being written on in advance, with lines, forms or letters to trace, copy or color. Once they are done working, reward them by allowing them to use the materials to create freely.

Click here to download a list of fun alternate writing materials!

List of Fun Writing Materials

What alternate writing materials have you used in your class? Let me know, and I’ll add them to the list!

Rocks!

May 23, 2017 by Felicity

“The student will investigate and understand how the Earth’s surface is constantly changing. Key concepts include, a) identification of rock types…”

The above is a 5^th grade Standard of Learning (SOL 5.7) as written for the state of Virginia, under the category Earth Patterns, Cycles and Change, and is the one I chose for my next science unit. I selected this standard for a number of reasons. First of all, rocks are something that most students are already familiar with, at least to some degree. Secondly they are readily available, and finally they have obvious visual and physical characteristics. These three factors should make writing this lesson relatively straightforward, or so I would have thought!

If you look at the resources available for teaching rock identification, the first thing you notice is that the words metamorphic, igneous and sedimentary figure prominently. Should I teach these words? Are they necessary for the student to gain an understanding of rock types? How about the concepts of magma and plate tectonics? Teaching about rock types has suddenly become a lot more difficult!

Anyone who has tried to adapt the general education science curriculum to meet the needs of students with significant cognitive disabilities knows what I’m talking about, and it is the reason why the same tired content is often taught over and over again. Students with significant disabilities have been exposed to the life cycle of the butterfly and frog countless times. They have charted the weather, observed which objects sink and which ones float, and they have experimented with magnets to see if a pencil or a paperclip is attracted to it.

My goal with enable2learn is to provide you and your students with unique and meaningful science units, structured in a way that makes unfamiliar concepts accessible to all your students.

So stay tune, Let’s Learn About Rocks! will be available to members mid-June and will include a book, lesson plan, visuals and an assessment. Please sign up for my newsletter to get updates on when new material is uploaded.

Teaching Social Studies and Science to Students with Intellectual Disabilities

February 2, 2017 by Felicity

Hello and welcome to my blog! My name is Felicity, and I am a former special education teacher, who taught students with a wide range of abilities and challenges. It was always very important to me to make all learning experiences meaningful for my students, regardless of their cognitive abilities. Needless to say, this was often a struggle as I tried to meet the demands of No Child Left Behind in the content areas of science, and even more difficult, social studies. I found that I was often compelled to turn to materials developed for preschoolers or English as a second language learners. Too often the former was not age-appropriate and the latter was too difficult.

A search of the web turns up very little (if anything) for the teacher hoping to teach something about early American settlers to students with intellectual disabilities who may well not have any idea of what you mean when you say “long ago”, (much less when you try to explain crossing the “ocean” in a big “sailing ship”)!

Over the years, however, I found that my students were able to gain and retain science and social studies concepts when I used the best practices of creating a link to what they knew, breaking the ideas down to their simplest component, using visuals and concrete examples and of course–repeating, repeating, repeating. Making the instructional materials was time-consuming and challenging but well worth the effort. My students clearly enjoyed their social studies and science lessons and I was proud of their ability to demonstrate an understanding of difficult subjects.

After leaving the teaching profession, I decided to create social studies resources for teachers of individuals with intellectual disabilities. That idea soon blossomed into creating science resources, which led to sharing my method for teaching unit concepts, behavior strategies that worked for me, and more. I hope you find this website useful! I am working on the next science unit (Living vs. Nonliving) that will be uploaded soon. My focus is to continue to add to the Science curriculum, with a new unit every month or so. In addition I will be adding new visuals, behavior strategies and Unit Concepts on a regular basis.

Please let me know via my email (enable2learn@gmail.com) if you would like to see specific units developed.

Come back and check out my blog as I share my thoughts on new teaching strategies, important political developments as they relate to our students and more. And don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter to find out when new materials are added!

–Felicity