How Is It Almost May Already?

Sometimes being a special ed teacher is exhausting! 

It is that time of year where, on one hand, I can't believe the year has gone by so fast, and on the other hand, each week seems to crawl by at a snail's pace. I haven't had the energy to write in this blog lately.

One of the things I have been dealing with is that one of my students (Towhee) has such severe behavioral issues that he now has to be taught in a separate room, with not one but two paras with him. It has been very frustrating because they gave us a 1:1 para for him, but he requires 2 people with him, and at least one of them needs to be trained in CPI (crisis de-escalation and restraint). This has meant restructuring our entire classroom lives so that Towhee can have the majority of our time, energy and resources, while the rest of my students get whatever is left over. Before Towhee was given a 1:1 and before the special ed director moved him into his own tiny classroom, it was even worse, because the expectation was for me to work 1:1 with Towhee in the empty classroom next door all day long, while the paras just ran the rest of the classroom on their own.  I do love Towhee, but it is just frustrating that it is always the students with the most severe behaviors that take priority over everything else. Last year when I worked in a different school, my classroom was similarly hijacked when the special ed director there decided that the 23 students on my caseload would get to work with a different random substitute teacher in another room every day for the rest of the school year, while I devoted all of my time to two students with severe behavioral issues, one of whom actually punched out a screen and jumped out the window and another who regularly busted holes in the walls and the bathroom door. My other kids made zero progress because they couldn't even have a steady teacher or para... just a string of subs... while my whole job was just to contain these two kids who weren't even allowed to leave the room to go to specials because their behavior had become so unsafe. I didn't get lunches or planning time that school year... I was expected to sit and eat lunch with the students, because they couldn't go to the cafeteria. So at least this Towhee situation is a little better than that. But still. I feel bad for all of my other students (last year and this year) who also have special needs, who really require structure and stability and consistent instruction, whom we struggle just to figure out how to serve because we are so busy directing most of our time and attention towards the kids with behavioral issues... in this case, Towhee. There have been days when I've had to send some of my students to their gen ed classes, literally to be babysat (they just brought some worksheets to do or books to read while they were there) because I didn't have enough staff to supervise them in the classroom. I didn't even have enough staff to have a human being in the classroom with them, let alone enough staff to actually teach them their reading lesson!

But I digress...

I think next year is going to be a lot better. I will have a much better idea of what I am doing, and I will have the whole summer to get my classroom organized and ready, instead of just a few weeks like I had this year. I sort of wish I could fast forward through the rest of this school year so I could get a fresh start!

At any rate, I have three new games I made using Widgit online, and I am sharing them for free at TPT. The first two are train-themed  CVC reading games.  Both involve simply rolling a die, moving around a train track, and reading CVC words.

Regular "Go Train Go" has CVC words with pictures.

Level 2 Go Train GO has CVC words without pictures.

The next game is a money game with a rainforest game. To play, you roll a die, move around the board, and collect coins. (The coins have Touch Points on it because that is how my students are learning money, but you don't have to know Touch Points to benefit from the game.) If you land on a rainforest animal, you can adopt it for 50¢.  If you land on the stop sign, you have to donate 10¢ to the cause, and put that money in the middle of the board. If you land on a present, you get any of the money that is in the middle of the board. The winner is the person who adopts the most animals. Like Monopoly, this game can go on forever. My 3rd graders, Noddy and Martin, have actually begged to play it every day at math time, so we've been writing down how much money and which animals each player has at the end of each math session so that we can pick the game up again the next day. This game has really given them a lot of practice at counting coins and spending money, and has also been a great way for me to assess their progress. And you can have it for free! It is called Save the Rainforest Touch Money Game. I hope you like it!

I will try to update more regularly if I can. Thanks for reading, everyone!

My Little Dudes And Dudettes

I thought I'd take some time today to tell you about my students. It is always interesting to read and write about the activities and lessons we do in the classroom, but really, it is the students who actually make the magic happen. Obviously I am changing the names and I won't reveal any identifying details, but at least you can get the jist of who I spend my days with as of late.

My class is a Life Skills class for first through fifth graders.

Robin is a fifth grade girl who loves to draw and is very kind to the younger kids. She is a sweet girl even though she is always trying to be in charge of everyone... including the teachers! For instance when I was trying to teach her group some math, and I used a dry erase marker to make number bonds on the table, she interjected, in a perfect Mom voice, "Is that really necessary?"

Brant is a fifth grade boy who really likes building things. I love watching him build stuff out of Lincoln Logs. He spends a lot of time helping his dad build stuff around the house. He's the kind of old-fashioned kid who would rather spend his weekends riding his bike around the neighborhood, building something in the yard, and playing Hide And Seek with other kids, than sitting inside playing video games. He is also one of the more friendly and easy-going kids in the class, although lately I think adolescence is starting to get its icy grip on him, because he's been a lot grouchier lately.

Tern is a fourth grade boy who sometimes drives me crazy. He is very easily irritated and spends most of his time screaming at the top of his lungs because someone has somehow annoyed him by looking at him, talking too loudly, sitting too close to him, humming, etc. He's also one of the most friendly kids with adults. He always wants hugs and always wants to tell you about the interesting things going on in his life. He likes to ask tons of questions about us teachers, and he remembers the answers. He also has the makes and models of everyone's car memorized. He's always telling me that he saw my car in some parking lot or another.

Martin is a third grader who has a very low IQ and a very high level of social skills. He loves sports but would rather watch them than play them. His mom took him to see the Harlem Globetrotters once, and he got angry because "They're not being serious about the game! They're just screwing around!" It may take him the rest of his life to learn how to read, but he absorbs a lot just from experiences. He's very interested in the world.  He is another kid who has no interest in video games and would rather be out doing fun things in real life.

Noddy is a third grade boy who cannot, for the life of him, stop moving. On any given morning he is very likely to come somersaulting or cartwheeling into the room. He is the reason I bought a trampoline, a tunnel, and scooters for my class. He's very artistic and will spend hours painting, drawing, or making something out of construction paper. At the beginning of the school year his mom told me that last year she had to pick him up from school a bunch of times for having out-of-control behavior, but this year he's become a model student, often the first one to follow directions in the classroom. He's a neat little dude!

Teal is a second grade girl who, at the beginning of the school year, had a major attitude, did not know any letter sounds, and could not count. She spent most of her time screaming and jumping on the tables, which left very little time for learning. She still has a major attitude, but we've managed to tame it a little bit... and she can now read CVC words, can add one-digit numbers with almost 100% accuracy, and is learning to tell time. She's the kind of kid that makes you get tears in your eyes because you realize what you are doing is actually working for at least one kid!

Towhee is an adorable second grader who loves trains and hates to do anything anyone asks him to do. He spends about half of his time drawing trains, talking about trains, or playing with trains, and the other half of his time having conniption fits because he doesn't want to do any work. I somehow have a soft spot for him though, which is pretty lucky since none of the paras will work with him anymore. The majority of my time these days is spent trying to figure out ways to manage his behavior and get him to somehow learn something while he's at school. Every classroom has at least one kid like this, right?

Wren is our youngest member of the class. She's a first grader who is 7 going on 17. She's always trying to boss Towhee around and look after him. The two of them are like an old married couple. with her looking over his shoulder and saying, "No, you're doing that wrong! Let me do that for you!" We have to remind her to let him do his own work. The two of them are always either hugging and playing nicely, or biting each other's heads off.

That is my whole gang this year! They are very cool kids. Sometimes they drive me crazy... but every day, when I take them to the bus, they all hug me and yell goodbye to me as if it is the last time they'll ever see me. And every morning, when they arrive, they greet me so happily. They love to be at school, they try their hardest, and they make me happy to be a special ed teacher. There are many things that suck about special ed and about the entire school system in America, but these kids make it all worth while for me!