Four Ways to Provide Supports to the Curriculum

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The Law

The most significant legislative action that affected children with disabilities passed in 1975 with the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. This legislation means that students with disabilities have equal access to a free and appropriate public education. Access means that that students with disabilities are actively engage in learning the content and skills of the general education curriculum, not just physically in the same room as other students. In order to effectively do this there is a need to provide support to the curriculum.

The Need

A family makes the request that their child be fully included in their grade level classroom. Their child may have significant challenges with understanding language, expressing themselves, and interacting with their peers. How do you meet the needs of the child while honoring their request that this be done within the grade level classroom with the obstacles of higher number of students to teacher ratio, higher level expectations of communication, and increased demands for output? You need to make an analysis of the curriculum and make adaptions to meet the needs of your student. Here is the process and simple ways to provide support to the curriculum.

The first thing is to know what is the essential element of the lesson. To demonstrate this we will examine at the EL Curriculum, an English Language Curriculum used by my school district. One of the first lessons for the Kindergarten to 2nd grade is a story ” The Magic Bow”. This is a fable like story about an old woman and a magic bow. The key idea in the story is that students need to set goals and then work towards these goals. Knowing that this is the key idea we then have our focus for adapting the curriculum. We then have the essential point that we need to provide support to the curriculum.

Now that you have the key idea the first step could be then creating visuals for the story. In the curriculum this is a story that is read to the child without pictures so it is just an auditory task. By putting pictures to the story you are using two different senses, auditory and visual. It also helps to break down the story and make it more concrete. This is a very easy way to support the curriculum.

For some children there is a need to create even more visuals. I find that it is a great way to begin teaching literacy skills. I have a rebus read. A rebus read has pictures with the words. The children follow the reading going from left to right. I have been amazed at how quickly students pick up on this skill and begin to be able to ‘read’ the words. This is another way to adapt the curriculum for those students that cannot read to be able to have the same reading experience as their peers.

Students with some attention difficulty you want to create a reading opportunity that also allows them to be a more active participant. An interactive adapted book has pieces that the student moves as they listen to the story that is being read. This assists the student in learning the vocabulary of the story. It is another area in which the educator or speech and language pathologist needs to determine what are the key vocabulary words that you want to teach the student. Adapting the curriculum for a student with significant difficulties might mean creating an interactive adapted material. This may be the support they need in the curriculum.

Active learning in which the student has a motor component in the learning process is an important adaption. For this lesson we are talking about ‘targets’ or goals so any game or sport activity would work. I purchased a target game at Amazon. It was fun because as part of the game there were multiple opportunities for the student to practice and we talked about how this would be similar to what we need to do with our school work. For many students this is the support to the curriculum that they remember long after the lesson is finished.

It is important to connect families to what the children are learning. I love thinking of ways that the students can share this so again they are more active participants. Some of this can either be a parent letter home with the vocabulary and key idea, an activity that the child can do with their family, or a copy of the black and white story. Including the families assist with curriculum accommodation.

It is important that you check the child’s understanding of the story. It is helpful to use a graphic organizer. Graphic organizers is another visual tool that can assist in having the students a more active participant in the learning process, can assist to evaluate the student’s comprehension, and aids in retention and understanding of the connection between concepts. Something I found was that some of my graduate students had a difficult time knowing the main idea. I include a graphic organizer that is blank and one that is filled in.