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